I realized I hadn't posted pictures from inside the hospital. So let's take a tour.....
First stop is the main attraction of the hospital - the operating room. Certainly not what we'd expect to see in the United States, but, adequate and almost luxurious, by Ch*dian standards. 
Another view of the same OR table. Notice the lights above the table. Mattias made a contraption that would allow Paul to adjust the lights. Previously they had been mounted on the ceiling and were difficult to adjust on a case by case basis.
These are the storage cabinets. As you can see, there is not an abundance of supplies. The top shelf of the middle cabinet were empty until Paul stocked all the suture and needles that I brought to him. Although he is able to purchase medication in the capital, supplies like suture material, needles, and sterile gloves are hard to obtain. He was very grateful for the supplies. I only wish I had known that he needed these sooner so I could have contacted more people for donations before I left. I know now, so I have people gathering unwanted supplies that I'll store and take with me on the next trip.
Paul and Kay are standing in the left side of the picture.
This table is for all the sterilized materials for surgery. There are sterile gauze pads, towels, gowns, and instruments. All ready for the next surgery.
If you thought the first OR looked a little bare, check out the second operating room used for "dirty" cases. They are in desperate need of another table for this room. This one falls apart on a regular basis.
These are the "recovery" room beds. I'm not sure who donated these beds but they are very old hospital beds. They have "cranks" - not electric. There are two of these bed in the recovery room.
After "recovering" the post surgical patients are allowed to stay in the post operative rooms. One for the men, one for the women. Two of the women below, were women I had seen the day before. The one on the right had come into the dispensary in labor, having been referred to us because she had been in labor for several days and had only progressed to 3 cm. When I checked her she had progressed to 4cm, but I could tell something about the baby's position wasn't right. It wasn't breech, but it wasn't allowing her body to labor well. I wanted to break her water so we knew what was going on, but Pusharie (the local midwife) was very much against it. Later that night when her water broke on it's own, she had a face presentation and Paul had to do an emergency cesarean section. Mom and baby were doing well.
The other woman toward the front of the picture had come into the dispensary with pelvic pain and pressure. She thought her uterus was falling out. She had a pelvic mass the size of a melon that I thought was probably ovarian. Paul removed it. She was doing fine on her first post operative day.
Did you notice the nice beds? Mattias and his students made all the bed frames in his welding classes at the vocational school back in Moundou.
Here is the men's ward. I only know about one of the men. He had come into the village around 2am with an incarcerated hernia which require Paul to operate on in the middle of the night. That's what happens when you live right next to the hospital. Paul did surgery on him from 2 until almost 5am and then worked the entire next day with Sean and Kirk. That's Paul standing on the left in the picture.
You may recognize this building from one of my other pictures, but this is where the families of the post operative patients stay and make food for the patients. Patients may be there for a couple of days to a week depending on the type of surgery they had. This is a hardship for families, especially if they have travelled a far distance to come here for help for their family member.
The picture below gives you an idea of how the families cook their meals. It's actually a very efficient method for a stove. Great heat source with minimal use of fuel. Cook pots of most any size fit in the top.
Of course if you are going to cook for your family member, you have to bring your supplies. Here, chickens and other livestock roam free. It's the ultimate in "free range" livestock. In this picture, the chickens were checking out the out patient door as though they thought they might drop in for a visit. I still can't figure out how they keep track of who the chickens belong to.
On our last evening, just as the sun was setting, we had to stop seeing patients because of the lack of light in the dispensary. Paul really wanted to run the electricity from the hospitals solar panels and storage batteries up to the dispensary. He had tried to wire it himself by just attaching pieces of wire he found and burying it in the ground. Of course the first good rain took care of that. Shane came to the rescue again. We all had "hard" jobs from time to time, but no one on our team worked harder and in more adverse conditions that Shane. And he never complained. We spent most of an afternoon in 100 degree heat in an attic with bats and bugs and lizards trying to install electricity in the guesthouse. And then with great patience proceeded to "fix" the issues that stood between the hospital and the dispensary electrically.
Don't get me wrong. Darrin was also awesome... in fact because of him, the guest house will now have running water, as soon as the barrel on the roof fills with rain water. Mattias and Darrin move the toilet in the guest house so a sink could be installed, installed a sink and a faucet in the bathroom, attached a water source to the shower so then next time we come we shouldn't have to take bucket baths and installed a faucet in the kitchenette. You guys rock!
All this while neither one of them was feeling very well. I never heard either one of them complain. There were only words of encouragement and "I can do all things with G^d's help" attitude.
Life is hard here... Life is hot here... G+d is good here... All the time.
G+d seemed to be teaching us all lessons... And we all wanted to be listening to every word He had for us
This was to be our last day in Gadjibian. It's been hard, but good. Learning to lean on G^d and not myself for understanding has been a valuable lesson.
The food, actually, eating in general, has been hard for me. Eating while there are starving children and women is hard for me to understand, yet I am thankful I've never gone hungry. I've learned to sit beside Shane or Darrin. They help me with the parts of the chicken I haven't been able to make myself eat, like the heart or gizzard. I want to be thankful - to the Ch^dians who gave up their chickens and worked to prepare and serve a meal for me, for Darrin and Shane who eat my "piece" of chicken and for Jeremy who eats most of the bone also...
Ps 100:4 went through my mind a lot that day. "Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise, Give thanks for him, Praise His name." In my journal I wrote a quote that G^d brought to mind. I couldn't remember who I quoted, but "G+d has always been good about reminding me of things he wants me to remember - "Our b^blical act of w=rship is really not what we do on Sunday mornings when we're all dressed up, BUT our act of w=rship is a life long, seven-day-a-week process of placing ourselves upon the alter of sacrifice. Worship is living the principles of Chr*st in everything we do. In other words, I am w*rshipping G=d by what I do all week long."
I took a wonderful, cold bucket shower that night and slept well. We were supposed to leave at 6am for our next destination - Bedralal
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