From Maarten Oct. 9
Here's the Zambian news from Monday and Tuesday . The enclosed photo was taken outside Flying Angel's School after the Sunday Church Service. Benard is wearing a Clinton church t-shirt, and Maarten seems to be wearing a Zambian shirt. The North American "suit" is definitely boring compared with this!
From Maarten:
Pastor Benard hasn't stopped thinking things through yet. The next plan is to set up a medical clinic for N'Gombe. This is where Dr. Brian Kongolo comes in, and that was what we were discussing at lunchtime today. If all these ideas come to fruition, we will have a new primary school in N'Gombe run by Kondwa, an expanded Flying Angels program, and a pretty comprehensive home visiting/clinic arrangement for the community. (Now, all we will need is to make arrangements for Dr. Brian to have courtesy privileges at Clinton Public Hospital and we will be all set.)
Yesterday at the Kondwa Pre-school was unique. About an hour after we got there, Angela received a phone call from Andrew Stock at Freshmark foods, a Zambiawide food wholesalers, asking her to collect some reject produce. So, after Joan and I finished washing up lunch dishes for 160 pupils and graduates of Kondwa, we set off in Angela's Toyota 4x4 to the warehouse, located west of Cairo road. I've never seen so much food under one roof in my life. Then Andrew showed us what we could sort. After about three hours' work loading two trucks and depositing all of it in the storeroom at Kondwa, we had managed to bring in about 400 pounds of potatoes, 200 cabbages, a bushel or so of pears, two or three bushels of apples, oranges, tangerines, cucumbers, broccoli and a few other items of which I cannot remember the names. Cleaning, cutting up, sorting and distributing to needy families in the compound will take place today. In cabbage alone, there is enough to feed the children for four weeks. Andrew Stock, a south African, really likes Angela and apparently lets her do this three times a month. Even Angela thought that this was the biggest donation ever.
Today, at the primary school, three hundred hats were distributed to great excitement. That just about covered attendance for the morning. Joan did a devotion (which went over quite well), and then,following more pictures, we were off to the Roman catholic hospice in Kalingulinga where I spent the rest of the morning working with Brian Kongolo in the clinic. While I was there, I saw about fifteen people. The oldest was a man of 51 with ascites, likely from abdominal TB. The youngest was a really good looking woman of 18 who was HIV positive. One man had severe hypertension; one woman had back problems and a paresis of her lower limbs, and the rest had various opportunistic infections, courtesy of AIDS. I looked at the book of fifty death certificates, as completed by Dr. Brian between July 26 and October 7 of this year. Thirty-three individuals were noted to have died of AIDS or AIDS complications as underlying problems; 19 had disseminated TB as part of the problem; 4 individuals had disseminated Karposi's sarcoma, and a couple of 21 year olds died upon arrival with meningitis or something equally bad (also a complication of AIDS. I reviewed the findings with Dr. Brian, and as far as he was concerned, all but three had died of AIDS related illnesses. It's a different world.
Tomorrow, I'll bring the big boxes of Health Partners medications to Flying Angels and Dr. Brian and I will be running a clinic there. We'll start at 2 p.m. Jessica and Joan plan to come along to help.