Saturday March 14

There are special moments in the life of Africa Mercy OR which will always remain with me. This particular moment took place on Wednesday morning when I was preparing to help anaesthetize a 4 year old boy who was to have his congenital cataracts removed. Picture if you can a Greek doctor who now lives and works in Germany. He has four children of his own. He also happens to speak French and English. He's tall and slim with a beard.

Very gently he carries the blind, frightened child into the OR, talking to him all the time and sits down with the boy on his lap. His long arms are wrapped around the child to make the child feel secure. In one of his hands he has a face mask and places it carefully over the nose and mouth of the child and then begins to rock the child while singing a barely audible lullaby in French into the boys ear. There you see compassion in action as the child goes to sleep without struggling or crying. A special moment indeed.

We a new ophthalmologist with us now. Dr Hofman will remain with us for 3 months to complete her fellowship and when she leaves us will be moving to Gabon to a village 10 hours drive from the nearest city of Libresville. There she will be working as an eye surgeon for 2 years sponsored by Samaritans Purse. If you help with the shoeboxes at Christmas there's a high likelihood that its the Operation Christmas Child run by the same organisation. She has now been joind by her husband who is not a doctor and he is going to help out on the eye team an a more administrative capacity so we are delighted to have them with us.

I am now more confident about giving peribulbar blocks and have "flown solo" with them. All seems to be going well thus far.

We have also been privileged to welcome onboard Dr Bryan Burton from Seattle who is giving a series of lectures/sermons on Mission why and how we do it, looking at God's calling etc. I've enjoyed the first 2 sessions and look forward to the others. Boring he is not and he has a very easy accent on the ear.

Today being my only day that I can leave the ship this weekend as I'm on call tomorrow, I was offered the chance to travel to a resort about 50k away where there was a very clean pool with the option of beach or pool as they were next to each other. A long swim and a pleasant lunch, a few minutes of quiet rest and it was time to return. This was definitley the better option to running the Cotonou half marathon which also took place today. I was tempted to join in but thankfully common sense prevailed as I've not been running for sometime.

I have however undertaken some form of exercise for the last 5 days be it in the gym, running on the dock in the early morning or swimming. So having said that I needed to increase my regieme of exercise to keep fit I have commenced. long may it continue!!