I asked Dries which of the following scenarios he would choose: a – to be in urgent need of medical care and end up in a very bad hospital b – to be put in prison because of a false accusation
Let me just clarify, both prison and hospital on our island are indistinguishable from one another when it comes to hygiene and care. He struggled to choose between the two and opted for the hospital one where I leaned towards the prison what-if.
We have many horror stories to share about both hospital and prison, for the most part not concerning us, but somehow we always end up having to assist in a situation. An aquaintance who is a foreigner was arrested and her husband had a serious stroke. It is a complicated story, but I went to the hospital to see how he was doing, but they were already planning to evacuate him to Antanarivo. She got arrested, because of some business dealings and I tried to support her at the police station. The corruption is now so bad that as a foreigner you have to be very careful. So, the woman is in prison and the husband could not be evacuated to have proper medical care.
We are working through the book of Proverbs with the Saturday Rangers and there is so much wisdom to guide and shape the lives of the young people. Wisdom and righteousness go hand in hand. That is why the fool says in his heart that there is no God and lives according to what is right in his own eyes. The wisdom of God leads us to live in righteousness. That does not mean that life will be easy, but the comfort to know that God protects us and provides for us, will motivate the young people to strive for righteousness.
I started a sketching faces merit with this group. It is something completely different and they seem to enjoy this creative change. They put in a lot of effort and we look forward to see how they develop this skill.
Dries and Norbert put the wooden beams back on the toilets and Norbert will finish the roof. Dries and I hope that we’ll be done with all the preparations to start work on the boat by the end of next week. We had quite a lot of rain again, which slowed us down.
To end on a positive note concerning the lack of good medical care here. Umi, Euphrasie’s first grandchild who is 3 months old, developed an abcess in her under arm area. Euphrasie came back from the hospital and said that she did not trust the doctors nor their diagnosis. They wanted to operate after diagnosing a tumour! So, we took some pictures, asked for help and advice promptly came from a doctor friend in Germany. We managed to find a decent private doctor here who drained the abcess. We followed the instructions about the care of the wound and little Umi is doing fine.
The story of Umi is an example of how God takes care of His children despite the bad circumstances.
Be blessed!