Bongolo and recent events

In my last post I briefly mentioned what I will be doing in Bongolo, and while I don’t exactly know a whole lot more, I do know that I am going for certain.

Everything worked out quite well, so I have housing and ways to help. I leave Monday, at 11am, and fly to Mouila, we should arrive there about 3 or 4pm (The flight itself is about an hour, but they never leave on time). I’ll be flying down with another missionary couple and their little girl; they just came up to get their Carte de Sejour. In Mouila there will be an SUV with a driver waiting for us, and he’ll drive us an hour or two to Bongolo. So ETA is 6pm.  I’ll eat dinner with the Thelanders, and then I’ll get settled in to my new borrowed—it’s real occupant is in the US for a few months—apartment.

            While there I will have a couple of jobs. I’ll help out with Luke and Sarah’s homeschooling, giving their mom, Joanna, more time to get her job done. I’ll also be the PAACS Administrative Assistant. Here is the PAACS website, it’s a pretty neat program www.paacs.net . It’s basically a surgery residency for doctors in Africa. They come and learn how to be surgeons, and then they can go back out to their different countries and help save lives through surgery. I’ll be doing different administrative things that are important, but that the doctors and others there don’t have time to do.

The PAACS program will also provide more for me to do, in that the surgeons have to take tests in English. This means that they have to know the language fairly well. Their lectures and their experience in the OR are in English, but I may be helping one or two of the PAACS students by helping them with their English.

I’ll also find ways to help out with the hospital, one suggestion has been to help at the well baby clinic.

Sundays provide plenty of things to do, as many of the missionaries go to different local churches or church plants. I’ll be able to see different churches and hopefully find a way to help at them as well.

It seems that there will be plenty of things to do while there. I’ll also have more reliable internet I’m told, which is exciting. Who would have guessed that moving to the jungle would mean I’d have better technology! :-)

 

I will tell you more about that once we get there, but I thought I’d tell you briefly about the various things we’ve been doing here in Libreville this last week or two here.

 

One day Chuck, Tim, and I all went along with Arthur to see how he is helping handicapped kids in Libreville. He did 9 months of training in another African country, and now he creates casts and braces to realign misshapen limbs and as aids to help people walk. He also does therapy where he teaches his patients, or their parents, different exercises to help them learn how to use their arms and lungs and even how to talk. We met three kids, Jeremy (6 Years old), Meghan (9 years old), and Daniel (1 year old). They have had a lot of improvement with all three. Arthur is the only one in Gabon who does this type of rehabilitation; He's currently working with 9 patients. He’s hoping to make it to a conference this year where they teach how to make braces and such out of locally available products. It's a really neat service that Arthur is involved in, but there is so much room for it to grow and to develop. 

 

 

Yesterday was a fascinating day. We went to Pastor Jacob’s and picked up him, Bertrand, and two girls—Albertine and Esther—who went to his old church in Premiere Camprement. Then we all headed out to Pastor Jacob’s Brother’s house. He has a little recording studio there, and our goal was to record a CD of some of the worship songs from here. We managed to get 6, and they sound pretty good. There were two guitarists, a drummer, a bassist and Albertine, Esther, and Pastor Jacob all sang. They all had microphones and the guitars and bass were all plugged into a sound board which lead to two speakers, the drum set was in the back of this itty bitty room and then we sat Meredith’s computer on a chair in front of the speakers and used Garageband. I think what we got was pretty good. They’re hoping to bring the stuff over to Tim and Meredith’s at some point though so that we can set things up better and not have to worry about background noise.

 

I know 3 songs now in French, plus random lines of lots of others. They don’t have the words written down anywhere during church, so they’re all pretty simple and very, very repetitive. But that makes it easier to learn, so it makes sense. The music is a lot of fun though and everyone claps along (in crazy patterns, forget the every other beat American church clapping...) and dances.

 

On the way back we went to Santa Clara again, and finally got into this little building that the chef out there had said we could use for a clinic until we get a building built. But it was difficult to find the keys so we drove around for a while, and then they said that we’d have to pay rent for it. That’s not what the Chef said, so we’re hoping that’s still not the case.

 

We’ve also had a lot of meetings with the mobile medical clinic that we go to the villages with and with the local clinic in town, trying to work out some kind of partnership.

 

We went to the beach one day (surprise) but this was a different beach, fondly referred to as the “airplane beach” because there are still pieces of a crashed plane around the beach. When we got there a group of gabonese were just starting to pull in a big net that they had spread out into the ocean. It was curved off the beach and in a semi-circle so that the net came back to ground on the beach about 30 yards down the beach. Then they both ends would pull the ropes attached to the net to drag it back into sea. We went over and offered to help and they accepted. It was a lot of fun. You’d start right at the ocean front and then pull, backing up so that you’d end up at the back of the beachfront where someone was coiling the rope. Then you’d let go, walk back down to the beginning, grab on and pull again. We got a pretty big catch. There were some tuna, and these fish called “capitans,” That were really pretty big fish, and lots of smaller ones that I have no idea what they were. There were also shrimp (big ones, 5-6in long) and then crabs. I saw a blue crab in the net, and pointed it out to one lady, and we worked to find him in the net (it was pretty big, so it’s hard to figure out which side to get him untangled from it) then once we found him she grabbed him and snapped off his two claw arms and handed the defenseless bubbling crab and his two arms to me. I felt very special. It’s the first time I’ve ever caught a crab. Later on in the afternoon, I was realising that I was going to have a hard time figuring out how to prepare and eat one crab and that it might not be worth it. So I was going to offer it to the same lady who helped me get it. She was reaching in her bucket where she had another live blue crab just like mine (I think mine died after his arms were ripped off, because all these bubbles kept pouring out of his mouth, and he didn’t move, unless you touched his eye, one would recoil). Anyway, so she reached into her bucket and started screaming and stood up with the live blue crab hanging from her finger. Then, she leans over and bites, yes, bites, the claw off her finger. I thought it was brilliant, but I never would have thought to bite a crab off my finger. Anyway, she was happy to take my crab for me. It was a really neat experience and a lot of fun. We also met a few people from South Africa, they’re white and speak English. So that was neat, it’s not everyday you meet someone who you can carry on a conversation with in English. They live in Libreville and do something with flying planes. I don’t remember exactly what.

 

Tonight we’re headed to Pastor Jacob and Mamma Martha’s for dinner. Pastor Jean Paul and Mamma Jeanine are going to be there too. And probably Bertrand since we’re leaving and he’s hear with us. He just does everything we do most of the time it’s pretty funny.

 

So, when I write next I’ll be in Bongolo!

 

Please pray for safe travel, and a good transition to life in the jungle!

Also please pray for Arthur Please pray for him, his patients and that he’ll be able to go to that conference.

 

Thanks!

 

Jessica