Living on the Africa Mercy

Living on the Africa Mercy Ship (MS) for the past week and a half has left us amazed at what is being accomplished through this agency. Over 400 people from around the world volunteer on the ship bringing hope and healing to the poor in Africa. One evening last week, Olive and I attended a presentation by Dr. Gary Parker. He was interviewed in a 60 Minutes feature that was filmed on the ship earlier this year. Dr. Parker is a surgeon who has been on the ship for over 20 years and his presentation was on the surgical process for repairing cleft lips and cleft palates. Absolutely amazing to see what can be done and the hope that it gives to people who likely have faced a lot of ridicule over their appearance and speech. We are delighted that MS is interested in partnering with Chris as her organization moves forward.

This was also an interesting week in our hospital visits. Previously we mentioned that we had visited 4 hospitals to meet staff, determine interest to collaborate with us and to have a tour of their operations. Since all 4 expressed an interest in further education, we are now going back to do a more thorough observation of their process in dealing with decontamination and sterilization of their surgical rooms, equipment and instruments. Chris has a challenging task ahead of her! The people involved in the process have minimal or no training in sterilization. They are nurses who split their time as OR nurses and sterilizers, using mostly old equipment (I am having a hard time trying to find operating information on the internet for the equipment that we are seeing) and doing things the way "the person before them did it". As a contrast Chris gave us a tour of the sterilization department on the MS and for the translators who accompany us (and who are not familiar with sterilizing or medical terminology), the contrast was stark!

On the positive side, all 4 hospitals have sterilizing machines that are working however due to either lack of knowledge on operating them or electricity issues, we have observed that they are not operating them at the temperatures required to sterilize the instruments.

Wednesday evening of this week we attended another presentation on board, this time by another surgeon, Tertius Venter (from South Africa) and his topic was plastic surgery and facial re-construction. He shared numerous photos of facial reconstruction that they have done on the ship and one of the things that struck me was his comment that to do many of the surgeries they face here, they do not have textbooks to refer to because it is so uncommon for these surgeries in the west or if they see similar problems in the west, they are often corrected very early in life. They also face a lot of serious burns and do some amazing things with skin flaps. For someone who gets queasy seeing any blood at the best of times, sitting through this presentation and seeing so many photos of various stages of surgery left me overwhelmed. I am in awe of the volunteers on the ship and their dedication.

I could go on and on with many stories we are hearing every day as we share meals with different people and get to hear a bit about their work.

Ice cream was served in the lounge area following the presentation – they even had chocolate sauce and sprinkles! While enjoying the ice cream we struck up a conversation with a nurse and a physiotherapist working on the ship. We ended up being given a tour of the hospital area. There are 4 “wards” – basically 10 bed wards in which the people recuperate after surgery. There was one for general surgery, two for plastics, one for maxilla/facial reconstruction, and an ICU. There was also a separate area for dressing changes and splint construction/physio. Each patient can have one family member stay with them – and the family member sleeps under the patient’s bed – sometimes for weeks at a time. There are no windows on this level of the ship, so patients are encouraged to go outside for an hour each day to get some sunlight. There’s a nice deck area set aside for them to enjoy the outside. Volunteers are also encouraged to adopt a patient and visit regularly. As French is spoken here and most of the volunteers speak English, there are interpreters available to assist with communication.

Yesterday (Saturday) we took the day off for an outing and a group of us took a taxi for about an hour’s drive to a gorge. From the top of the gorge, we hiked down to the bottom to a beautiful beach where we were able to get a meal of freshly barbequed fish, shrimp or chicken and rice or plantain chips. A few of us swam in the ocean and threw a Frisbee and just thoroughly enjoyed the day off. Some comments on the hike … saw cashew plants, a fruit that looked and tasted like passion fruit (but wasn’t), cassava plants, fascinating termite huts (look like toadstools), highways of ants and melodious bird songs.

Tried to download photos from our new camera today only to find out that our computer’s operating system is too old to handle it. Will have to try to find an alternative so we can get some photos onto our blog soon.