ali's african adventures

474.

I'm leaving that on its own line because I keep looking at that number, and I can't believe it's true. The pile of unmarked pink sheets is so small now that it actually seems possible that we can do this, that every one of these people will have someone praying for them from a world away.

They're almost all I think about these days. The last nine patients were discharged this morning while I sat at my computer, writing e-mails to all of you about the ones who never made it onto the wards. I stopped by A Ward before they left, and Josee shrieked my name, hugging me as we pretended to cry about our parting. I didn't actually cry until I left the ward and was back in my room, staring at the pile of pink sheets again.

We reshaped Josee's foot. We fixed Maurius' lip and Aissa's cheek. We built Tani a lip and a nose. We did so much. And there is so much left to do.

Thank you standing in the gap with us. For being the link that's going to hold us to this place long after the ship sails away.

On Thursday, I'm going to head off on an adventure around the world, carrying these names with me. I'm praying I can leave behind all six hundred sheets, each one with a little black dot in the corner.

It's just after midnight on the sixth of August, and I've just typed out five more names to add to what one prayer warrior, Heather, has called a "concert of prayer." Those five have pushed us over the halfway mark.

304. More than half of the sheets now have a little black dot in the upper right hand corner, the signal to myself that all is well, that this one has been taken care of, taken in, taken to heart by one of you.

Please, don't stop. I'm going to admit that I'm tired. It's emotionally exhausting to sit in front of my computers for hours and hours, reading through all these sheets, seeing entire life stories spelled out in just a few words and knowing all too well what lies ahead for some of them. My neck is aching from staring back and forth between the screen and the piles of papers, but I wouldn't trade this for the world.

Because I get to pray, too. Each one of these that I type out and send to you is another one that is more than just a name on a sheet of paper to me. I look at the boxes holding the different piles for the different types of surgeries, and I can go to sleep knowing that I've read more than half of the stories in them. I feel like I'm connecting with my own work in a way I never have before, and I wish I could find words to explain how right it feels.

So don't stop e-mailing me and commenting. Tell your friends. Post on Facebook and Twitter and whatever other newfangled technology I've missed in the last couple of years. Because there are still 296 pink sheets, two hundred and ninety-six of God's children who need to be lifted up to His throne again.

And while we're on the subject of prayer, can I add one more name to all of your lists?

Tim is one of my best friends on the ship, part of a group that's become family to me over the past few years. Just recently, we got to meet his parents and brother and sister when they came to visit the ship. Yesterday, Tim's dad passed away at a hospital in Iceland, where he and Tim's mum were on vacation. It was sudden, and there was no way for Tim to be there in time, so instead he's trying to figure out how to get back to Australia to be with his sister, who also wasn't able to be there.

Please pray for Tim and for his family. They're scattered across the world and their lives have just been shattered. While you're praying for the patients on your pink sheets, please pray for Tim, too.

Update #3 (5 August, 10:30 Africa time) : 239 of the patients are being prayed for. That is almost half, in less than 2 days. Keep it up. Spread the word. Pray.

Update #2 (4 August, 19:30 Africa time) : 164 names have been spoken for. God is stirring up hearts, and I am so humbled to be a part of His process in all of this.

Update #1 (4 August, 12:30 Africa time) : 102 of the names on the pink sheets have been e-mailed out across the world, and people are starting to pray.



We laid them out on empty stretchers in the recovery room. Six hundred pink sheets, filled with information we had gathered at screenings throughout the outreach. From all over Togo they came to us, and we sat with them, learned their names, recorded their pain, filed their stories in a desk drawer and asked them to wait for their healing.

Six hundred pink sheets.

They were the ones we turned away. The ones who were too sick or not sick enough. The ones who missed their surgery dates and couldn't be rescheduled because there were hundreds more to take their places. The ones we tried to call but couldn't reach.

Six hundred of them, and when I looked at all the pages strewn across the room I wanted to scream.

Because they've always been there. They're in every country we visit, but we've never seen them before, never made it to their villages to peer into the darkness of their little mud huts and bring them into the light. And this time we did, this time we drove to meet them and we said we'd call if we could help and then we never did.

Instead we laid them all out in an empty room and we did the only thing left to us. We prayed. We didn't finish today; there were too many, so we're going to do it again tomorrow. We prayed over each one of them. Over Yema, the little boy who just turned one in July, too small for his cleft lip to be fixed but probably not getting enough to eat at home because of it. Over Maka, eight years old with a left arm that can't straighten and fingers crippled from the burns he suffered when he was two. Over Abel, a young man with a hernia the size of a football who we tried to call and who never picked up his phone and so his paper was moved to the back of the pile again.

Over Yema and Maka and Abel and hundreds more, lives reduced to words on a sheet of pink papers. A pile of cleft lips. Important, more often than not checked on the bottom of the forms, no, no, no scrawled across the tops when we realized that time had run out. A handful of tumors, all marked positive for HIV and turned away because in the time it would have taken for them to get their CD4 counts done, we would have found five more to replace each one of them.

I cried this afternoon. Frustrated, angry tears, and I don't think I've ever been so aware of the scope of the need here in West Africa. By the end of an outreach, we usually have a few pink sheets left in the drawer in the OR office, lumps and bumps that didn't quite make it into the surgery schedule but weren't going to mean the difference between life and death. This time we found the forgotten, called out to the ones who've never heard the voice of hope and then we turned away because the time was too short and there were too many of them.

Six hundred pink sheets. Hundreds and thousands more sleeping on dirt floors tonight, nursing their pain and their fears as we get ready to sail away.

Pray with us. Please pray with us.

If you'd like to pray specifically for a patient, let me know in a comment or an e-mail, and I'll head down to the office and choose one or five or twenty names for you. If it's children who touch your heart, I'll find you a child to pray for. If you're drawn to those who have suffered burns, there's a whole pile of them. There are mamas and papas, old men and little girls, and they have all been told no.

Wouldn't it be incredible if we could find six hundred people willing to pray for these six hundred?

Please pray with us.

I was sitting at my desk in the office today, working on some mind-numbingly boring paperwork revisions when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I pulled the headphones out of my ears and turned around, expecting to be answering a question about where some box of supplies should be stored for the sail. Instead, a little girl clad in matching fabric from head to toe threw herself into my lap, shrieking my name.

Balkissa's tongue looks incredible. This second surgery has been a success by any standards, but it turns out God had bigger plans for little Balkissa than just the reshaping of her mouth.

The first time we met her, the doctor examining her heard something worrying through her stethoscope; the whoosh-whoosh of blood coursing through a heart formed wrong. And although the medicine we practice here is, by most standards, first-world, there are things we can't do. Diagnosing and treating congenital heart problems are definitely on that list.

Balkissa's not the first little one we've met with a faulty heart, and so we made sure she was strong enough for surgery and went ahead, leaving the murmur filed under the category of Things We Can't do Anything About. Her surgery, as you know, went well, but when she got home her tongue split apart again. A failure.

And this is where God's planning becomes beautifully clear.

When Balkissa came back to the ship for her second surgery, nothing had changed. Nothing except one of the anesthetists, a doctor named Paul. Paul wasn't here when we first met Balkissa, first heard her broken heart, but because she had to come back to us, he met her too and heard for himself.

Here's where it gets good, because Paul knows of a charity that does work here in Togo, a charity that takes kids to hospitals in the first world where they can get the treatment and surgery that they need for their heart defects. Today, one of our outpatient nurses took Balkissa to the clinic where they'd do an echocardiogram of her heart and decide whether or not the defect was something that could be treated. If it is, they'll make arrangements for her to fly off to another world, to another hospital (this one on land) where she'll be given yet another second chance.

There have been so many times that I've wondered whether any of the complications we see are for some sort of other purpose, whether God has plans for their coming back to us that go beyond just an infected wound or a broken-open suture line.

Today, I have proof. Proof that the hands weaving this story are so much more skilled than our own, that the heart loving through us is so much deeper than any I could dream up.

And speaking of hearts, I'll let you know what they find out about Balkissa's as soon as I know.