Saturday, March 28, 2009

First 3 months of 2009 in South Africa

I arrived back here in South Africa on February 4th my 64th birthday. Arriving a bit tired from the long journey my wife, Beth, picked me up from the airport and brought me immediately to our newly constructed home on Shikwaru Game Lodge. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was sharing my birthday with Moira the office manager of Shikwaru and that neighbors and staff were have a large surprise party for us in our new home. Moira’s husband, Abe Lincoln, the chef on our lodge prepared a wonderful South African braai with tasty pork ribs, lamb, chicken, and beef steak. I was hungry and tired and it was one of the best meals I had enjoyed in a long time. It was by far the best birthday I have celebrated in 64 years. There were about 30 of my South African friends at the party. I just love the community that we have here at Shikwaru. It is our own little family here in Africa. Beth arrived one week prior to me to do some shopping to decorate and supply our new home. I had last seen it when it was in the final stages of construction in September. It is an absolutely beautiful comfortable home built for community living and lots of company and long-term guests. Lisa Shadley, one of our long-term ambassadors traveled over here early with Beth to help set up housekeeping. Terry Richardson, our other current long-term ambassador, traveled with me. We were both very tired but so excited to be back here in the Africa that we love.

When time permits we take long 5-kilometer walks in the bush at sunrise each morning. I feel so much joy and happiness here in Africa this year. More than I have ever felt in my life. I am sure there are many reasons for my newfound joy but having our own permanent home here is one of the big reasons. The other primary thing that makes me feel such joy is that Beth also feels the same joy. God continues to bless our ministry and marriage, and we continue to experience exponential growth in spite of the slowdown in the worldwide economy. As we drove in, we saw a beautiful new gate entrance into the game farm and into the residential side of the farm. The new ambassador campus is progressing quite well. We are building 3 two-bedroom roundovels and a larger central roundovel for an office and shared dining and laundry facilities for all of our ambassadors. The ambassador campus is being built in honor of our good friends Bob and Leila Thompson. Bob and Leila are from our home church, which supplied a good share of the needed funds for this campus and Bob has been on the mission board at Des Moines First Assembly of God since they first developed a mission board. We presented this honor to Bob and Leila at the fall mission’s convention of First Assembly. Bob and Leila are in their 80’s and were both in good health in November 08 when we had this celebration for them. Just about 2 weeks later Leila became quite ill with breathing difficulties and had emergency heart valve replacement in the hospital. Just 2 weeks ago she passed away as a complication from this surgery. We love both Bob and Lelia so much and miss Leila now that she has passed over into Heaven. However I am so thankful that God gave me the vision to honor them while they were both alive and healthy and could enjoy being honored in this way. This missionary campus will be a small African village standing here at Shikwaru Lodge for many years. These are brick two story homes with a thatched roof and are just beautiful. I love walking by them each morning. When Leila died her family chose to have part of her memorial be given to this campus and the funds we received will be used to furnish the commons area of the Bob and Leila Missionary Campus. Some of Leila’s daughter’s and Beth’s good friends are also establishing a library of Christian books and DVD’s that will be placed in the Ambassador campus central community building. I am so thankful when I follow the little nudges that God sometimes sends my way. A similar thing occurred when I started a free medical clinic at Des Moines First Assembly to honor Beth’s Mom Margaret Cramer. Unfortunately she passed on into Heaven before she knew of that honor. We are praying that Bob Thompson along with several of his friends will be able to come to Africa in July to be present when we officially dedicate the campus. We have a beautiful portrait of them that will permanently hang in the living area of the community building.

Another one of the other main reasons for so much joy in my heart this year is that our two ambassadors, Terry and Lisa, are sacrificially living for the Lord and our ministry here. They both work day and night without ever the smallest complaint or sign of discouragement. In spite of an occasional poisonous snake, a few bugs and rodents, flat tires and getting our vehicles stuck in mud holes. They are working with small salaries and long difficult work schedules and also seem to be filled with joy. One additional small factor that contributes or our joy here, I think, is that we never watch TV, and in the USA all of the negative financial, political, crime news and other bad things steal a lot of people’s joy.
We have completed two of our usual optical outreaches; the first on over in Kwa Zulu Natal working with the Zulu tribes over near the Indian Ocean on the Mozambique and Swaziland border. We had a wonderful time on this outreach seeing nearly 800 children and learning lots about the Zulu culture and history.

Our second outreach was in the Mokopane area near the game farm and it was a blessing to be able to come home and sleep in our own beds each evening. It was also a blessing to be able to serve the children living near our home and headquarters. We saw a little over 800 children on this our second outreach of 2009. The efficiency and quality of our optical clinics continue to improve with each one we do. We are so blessed to have quality equipment like our Nikon Retinomax Auto Refractor. We are also blessed to have a good supply of attractive new glasses that we purchase from China. The children always love their new glasses. Just last night we had a pajama party where we took an online training put on by an eye ministry in Louisville, KY teaching me and the rest of our staff lots more about how we will soon be able to serve and care for children with severe astigmatism. That has been a weakness in the quality of our clinics up until now. I also just learned that if I will simply dilate the eyes of the children we see we will get much more accurate readings from our auto refractor. Since the training was given in Kentucky we were up from 1:00 AM until 5 AM to participate in the live training. I was very tired from hosting our large medical team that had just departed the day of the training but it was well worth getting up for to receive all of the tips that we got.

The last couple of weeks after we completed the second outreach, we all spent a lot of time and effort recruiting South African physicians and hospitals to come to our medical education conference. I had been working on it for about 18 months and had successfully recruited 10 highly trained medical specialists from America to come and speak along with former Governor Brandstad, president of Des Moines University. We also had Jerry Foster, an expert medical financial counselor and author, speaking on preventive maintenance for the medical marriage and financial planning for SA physicians. Right up until the week of the conference we still did not have any South African doctors registered for the conference. I was becoming quite concerned that all of these highly trained professionals would be donating 2 weeks of their time and money to travel 8000 miles just to be speaking to each other and not to the SA doctors as I had planned. We prayed and asked all of our prayer partners to pray with us for the doctors to come to the conference. Just 2 days prior to the conference I called my friend Dr. Buthelezi the head of the Limpopo Health Department in Polokwane and shared with him my concern; he immediately said that he would help me and sent out a notice to all of the public hospitals in Limpopo (about 50 hospitals) encouraging them to send their doctors to the conference. He also arranged for the Limpopo Health department to pay the tuition and lodging for doctors attending our conference. He actually told me that he thought that 150 doctors would be coming to the conference. I then became concerned that our prayers would be answered, and we would have more doctors at the conference that we could properly take care of. Our lodge is prepared to house around 100 guests, so we booked an additional 20 beds with one of our neighbors who also has a game lodge. At the end of the day about 60 doctors came to the conference along with our 5 visiting medical students from Des Moines University. I was proud of all of the American and South African doctors who spoke at the conference. We received lots of feedback from all attending about the excellent quality of the lectures and discussion. We are already beginning to plan our second annual international medical conference at Shikwaru. Next year I am thinking that we should put the conference on for 2 weekends back-to-back and have the American speakers give their same talk at both conferences to permit doctors on call the first weekend to come the second weekend permitting us to serve twice as many medical providers. On Monday after the weekend conference this year we all traveled to Polokwane, Limpopo the capitol city of Limpopo to sign an official agreement between Des Moines University and the Limpopo Department of Health and Social Development. This will pave the way for many new programs and permit us to have many more medical students from Iowa doing clinical rotations here in Africa. So far we have had 13 students do a one-month rotation and have had excellent feedback from all of the regarding the quality of their clinical and cultural experience. We are also helping the University of Limpopo develop a new medical school in Polokwane, and as soon as they begin enrolling students we will also have them do clinical rotations at DMU in Iowa. While the leaders of DMU were visiting the hospitals here in Limpopo they were quite impressed with the potential to expand our current clinical rotations to include a regular elective rotation in obstetrics for all of their students which will mean that soon we will have lots more students from Iowa coming here to SA. It appears that they will be able to deliver many babies during their one month rotation giving them wonderful experience and at the same time helping with the severe shortage of medical providers here in Africa. While the DMU leaders were here we also visited a college of optometry in Limpopo to evaluate the possibility of starting a new college of optometry at DMU. There are currently very few colleges of optometry in the Midwest so it looks like a good opportunity for DMU to grown into this new area. It would also be wonderful in providing many new optometry students and optometry doctors to help us in the optical work we are doing here in Africa. I had been praying that the Lord would provide additional optometrist and now it looks as if He may be blessing us with a whole new optometry college. One amazing thing that happened as we visited the optometry college in Limpopo is that when they learned that we were from Iowa they asked me if we knew Dr. Clark Jensen and he is a friend of mine who practices in Grinell, Iowa and had taught in the optometry school here for 5 years 20 years ago. It is truly a small world. One additional interesting thing I found out when we visited the optometry college is that I learned that they have a mobile outreach to the poor villages in Limpopo that travels by train and delivers free optical care to the poor giving their students good clinical experience and offering care to many people who could otherwise not afford it. They gave me permission to join them on one of these outreaches in August of September.

We really enjoyed hosting Iowa’s former governor Terry Brandstad in our new home. We are thinking of changing the name of his bedroom from the Leopard room to the Governor’s Room. It was amazing to watch he and Beth play Ultimate Scrabble. He held his own with her and she is one of the best scrabble players around as she plays almost every night.

This weekend, to just get away for 24 hours, I drove up to Botswana with Jacques and stayed at a beautiful game reserve right on the Botswana border. Beth and I had stayed there last year and really enjoyed it. The last couple of weeks have been so busy that she decided to stay home and catch up on some laundry and house cleaning. The real reason that I went ahead without her was to help host one of our guests from Iowa who wanted to see the area. This morning we did a game drive in a boat along the Limpopo River and saw three crocodiles.
When I got home this afternoon, I was reminded that we do indeed live in the bush and that it is sometimes a dangerous place. Andre, our professional hunter, was out making his rounds on our farm and found a baby zebra that had been attacked by a leopard. The leopard had attacked him in the neck area and he was severely injured. He brought him down to base camp and we began cleansing and bandaging his wounds. We got some milk and fluids down him and gave him a sedative shot. We were just getting ready to do some surgery on his neck to drain a possible abscess and further clean up the wounds when he stopped breathing. We were hoping that we could save his life and even have a pet zebra around the base camp but he was too young, and his injuries were too severe. The rest of the herd apparently was able to chase away his attacker and allow him to live as long as he did. As I was driving up the mountain this afternoon I also saw a black backed jackal reminding me again that there are lots of predators here and it is survival of the fittest.

We just sent the governor and our team of physicians home on Friday and our next optical team began arriving this afternoon with the arrival of Dustin Cox, a pastor from Waterloo, IA. Our home church, Des Moines First Assembly, will be sending several team members here this coming weekend along with our daughter Kelsey. It will be wonderful to have her here ministering with us for the next month.

Today I had the blessing of delivering my first baby here in South Africa. I was helping Jackie, the wife of our professional hunter, tour the maternity department at Mokopane Hospital and an unattended woman in the room just by the waiting room starting having her baby, so a nurse and I assisted her. It is a 3 kilogram beautiful baby girl.

2 comments:

  1. All great news Doc!
    Clay Hamm

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