October 23, 2007

Dear Family and Friends,

These past few months I, Jodi, as a clinical instructor for the first- and second-year nursing students of the Ekwendeni College of Nursing, have been supervising the students at the government hospital in town, Mzuzu Central Hospital. I work primarily in male and female medical and surgical wards and in pediatrics.

As a mother, I have ambivalent feelings about working in pediatrics: on one hand, my empathy with the families ensures the patients receive the best care that the student nurses can deliver, and on the other hand it hurts my heart sometimes just to walk into the ward in the mornings. However, one morning a couple of weeks ago, I was able to go into the pediatric ward with more than my nursing skills and empathy.

Love in action

A nursing student passes on a message from a U.S. Sunday school class to the mother of a sick child in Malawi.

A class of Sunday school children from a church in the States had spent time making cards for distribution to children here. Some of the cards had get-well wishes written in them; others carried the message “God loves you,” while others delivered color and enthusiasm. All of the cards put the feeling of love into action. The students enjoyed passing out the cards to all the children in the ward, and it broke up the monotony of the hospital routine for those in the ward. Thank you to those children in the Sunday school class for allowing the students and me to be conduits of your love for the children here.

A sad but typical story in ob-gyn

In the female ward I met a young woman who epitomizes the obstetrical and social nightmare that women in Malawi face. She lives in a very rural area of Malawi, only attended seven years of primary school, was married at the age of 17, and was pregnant at 18. She was 19 when I met her in the hospital for repair of both a rectal-vaginal and a vesicle-vaginal fistula.

Due to prolonged labor, the tissue that separates the rectum and the bladder from the vagina is worn away, and stool and urine leak from the vagina. When her labor started, she went to a traditional birth attendant in the village and stayed there in labor for nearly three days before she was taken to the government hospital for an emergency cesarean section to save her life. Her baby was already dead. When the complications from the prolonged labor were noted, she was sent to Mzuzu Central Hospital for surgical management.

The first surgery was the placement of a colostomy so stool could be collected in a bag for disposal. The urine leakage was not repairable at that time. I met this woman after her second surgery—to stop the urine leakage. It was unsuccessful, and she was being referred to Lilongwe for follow-up. The woman’s husband had left her and returned to his family home, and the young lady was essentially returned back to her family as, culturally, her value was now diminished due to her condition her probable inability to bear children. To prevent this kind of disaster, hospitals educate the public about normal and abnormal labor, using mobile clinics and community forums and training clinical officers and nurses to prevent and manage obstetric emergencies.

Nursing scholarships

Through the nursing scholarship established by the Medical Benevolence Foundation in 1998, at least 17 nurses have received either entry-level or specialty training. Of the 17 who were sponsored, 13 are still working with one of the three hospitals within the Synod of Livingstonia. Thank you for continuing to support the education of nurses. It not only leads to better care and more diverse services, it helps with staff retention.

It is with vicarious pride that we report that, Chrissy, whom we mentioned in our last newsletter, passed her accounting exams with high marks. She was one of four in a class of 17 who passed, and she the only female. Two of her wounds healed well, but she had to return to the hospital for surgical cleaning of her third wound. While in the hospital she was found to have developed an infection of the hip bone due to the depth and longevity of one of the wounds. She is on oral antibiotics for that, and hopefully that infection will resolve without complications. Please continue to pray for her healing.

Our family is heading to Kenya in November for a week-long PC(USA)-sponsored missionary retreat. We are looking forward to the time to be together as a family and a denomination, to a spiritual refreshing, to hearing of events at PC(USA), especially in the World Mission program unit, and of Mission Challenge ’07. We will also visit the counseling center where we took Michael and Jason previously, hope to fit in a movie and visit a bookstore in a mall in Nairobi.

Thank you all for your continued thoughts and prayers and that as Advent approaches, you may all experience His peace.

Jodi, Jim, Michael, Jason, Salome, Selina, John, and Joseph

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 337