March 2003, Miyerim, Cameroon
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Ps. 46:1
Note, names have been changed in this article to protect the innocent!
In 2003, we took a small team to Cameroon, West Africa to help in the church planting efforts of an American missionary and some Cameroonian pastors in the Akwaya region. This was a bush area in Cameroon. Our team was flown in first and we were to be joined by Dr. Carrie Loring the next day. It took about twenty-two round trip flights by the missionary pilot to get everyone into a village called Miyerim, plus the dental & medical equipment, supplies and food for everyone. The missionary pilot was to join us the next day when he brought Dr. Loring. With us was the Charleston family – Dr. Cliff and his wife and their four daughters. Also, Dr. Dresden was with us, a medical missionary with over forty years of field experience, two national pastors, a group of African women who were to be our cooks and a missionary nurse Eve, a neonatal nurse Sharon and Meredith, our sterilization specialist.
Nothing went as expected on this trip and it was very challenging for all of us. First, the weather changed after the first day and a sandy haze filled the air making it impossible for the pilot to fly. It was Harmattan, a seasonal weather event in West Africa, where sand from the Sahara Desert fills the air like a fog and makes the visibility too poor to fly. This meant no missionary pilot to join us the next day, no Dr. Loring to help with the patient load and no generator to power our dental equipment.
We set to work getting our sleeping arrangements figured out before darkness came, as it suddenly does, near the equator. The Charleston family, Nurse Eve, Nurse Sharon and Meredith, our sterilization specialist, were joined by Dr. Dresden in a mud-brick house that had been vacated for our team. Jack and I were given a smaller but similar house to ourselves. Both had dirt floors and bamboo ceilings and were open ended under a thatched roof. At night the chickens would fly up and roost above the ceiling over our heads.
There was a welcome ceremony held for us after supper that first night, by the villagers. We all gathered in the dark around a fire and the welcome began. It was a warm, African experience that we appreciated very much. But, in the days that followed there was an unfortunate cultural clash that made our time there rather difficult. We were a group of na’ive Americans left to learn how to manage in a bush village.
Please excuse the delicate subject matter but there were no bathroom facilities in the village (we were sixty miles into the bush by plane) and no running water. The Charleston family had brought a portable toilet which Jack and I ended up with and the bigger group had a contraption Jack and I had bought called “the Bivouac Buddy”. It was a toilet seat on legs with a garbage bag attached to it, surrounded by a shower curtain for privacy. As for showering, we climbed down the side of a steep hill to bathe in the river or used a lot of wipes to try to get clean. This was shaping up to be quite an adventure!
The next day we organized for clinic and began to treat patients. We asked the African pastors to give out numbers to the waiting patients but no more than twenty-five for the dentist and one hundred for the doctors. Dr. Dresden had been denied permission to practice medicine by the government because of his age. He was into his 80’s but had more experience medically than all of us combined! Like the gracious gentleman that he was, he was not offended but sat with Dr. Charleston and helped him diagnose patients. He helped us also with problems in the mouth that we had never even seen before. He walked us through a number of oral surgeries, encouraging us to do them for the patient’s sake before these growths got too big to deal with easily. How he strengthened us by his kind, humble demeanor. He slept on a mat on the ground like the others in his temporary home, never complaining about anything. The rest of us were stretched way beyond our comfort zone! His cheerful patience kept us focused on the needs of the people but more importantly on the gospel. He was fluent in Hausa, a West African dialect, and sought to share the message of salvation whenever he found a Hausa speaker.
We struggled a lot physically in Miyerim. We were not sleeping well (a side effect of the strong malaria medication we were taking) and were so busy during the clinic days. There wasn’t a great quantity of food and we struggled with eating some of what was served (namely fish that had been lying on pieces of cardboard in the dirt and heat, covered with flies). Jack lost fifteen pounds in nine days. We were also bitten repeatedly by insects, but it was Africa after all! At night we had to shut all the doors and windows of our “homes” to keep the bugs out but that didn’t keep everything out! The chickens of the village roosted above us and one night I awoke to squawking chickens and then teeth crunching bones. I realized there had been a chicken homicide above us! I woke Jack to tell him that “Something is in here!” Poor guy, he was so exhausted that he barely woke up, said briefly, “It’s just chickens” and went back to sleep. I moaned to myself “Chickens don’t have teeth! We were sleeping under a mosquito net up against the wall of our “home”, when a rat came tumbling through a gap between the ceiling and the wall and hit me on the head on the way down! Not wanting to wake the whole village, I stifled a scream but there would be no more sleep that night! Jack searched the room for the rat but he had escaped through a gap under the door. From then on we “slept” with a flashlight on but we didn’t sleep well.
The population of Miyerim was growing daily. The African pastors, not wanting to turn anyone away (because that was culturally unacceptable), gave out hundreds of numbers to would be patients. No amount of explaining that it was impossible to treat all these patients changed anything. The patients all expected to have a medical or dental visit because they were holding a number. Each day we worked non-stop trying to see as many as we could, ate some dinner, attended the evangelistic service and fell into bed exhausted. One evening as we walked “home” from the service, a man approached Jack to tell him that his sister was in labor and had come to Miyerim to have her baby. She had heard that there were American doctors there, and they had walked for ten hours that day while she was in labor. The man told Jack that he, Jack, needed to deliver his sister’s baby! Quickly bowing out of that situation by telling him he was a doctor for teeth only, Jack alerted Dr. Charleston and Neo-natal Nurse Sharon. Dr. Charleston was a family practice doctor and didn’t routinely deliver babies so he was hesitant to be the attending physician, especially in this situation. Nurse Sharon, who had been hoping to be part of a delivery since we had gotten to the village, was suddenly uneasy when she reviewed the primitive setting and thought of the lack of equipment and sterile procedures that were part of her neo-natal unit in the States. Dr. Dresden, stepped up and within forty-five minutes, the girl had delivered a beautiful baby boy on the floor of an African house, with only a plastic tarp between her and the ground. Both mom and baby were doing fine! She named the baby “Dr. John”, in honor of Dr. Dresden, who had helped her through the delivery with Nurse Sharon’s experienced assistance. In the early morning when we awoke, the baby’s mom was already gone. Along with her brother, she was trudging back home with her firstborn child after giving birth the night before.
We were overrun with patients coming from miles away. One woman came with a large boney growth in her mouth that was way beyond what we could take care of in a village setting. She would soon die, as she was not able to eat anymore because of its size. (Thankfully, at the end of our time in Miyerim, our pilot was able to fly her to a Christian hospital for surgery and paid the fee himself). One man with leprosy was carried into the village on a make shift stretcher. It was like a scene from Bible times!
The number of patients to be treated was growing by the day and everyone on our team was tired. There was a national holiday that week and we decided that we would take a day off and go out of the village to escape the pressure to treat people. We knew if we stayed to try to rest there would be no rest because of people begging to be seen. We were assured by the Africans that it was a short walk to the nearby town of Akwaya and also a flat walk. So off we went, taking water with us, and being assured that we could buy water at our destination. It was terribly hot and it was downhill most of the way (so much for a flat walk!). It took over two hours to reach Akwaya town and by the time we got there our water was gone. No “stores” were open because of the holiday so we had no choice but to walk back without water. It was uphill, of course, all the way. We were growing more faint and dehydrated with every step and we knew we were in trouble. One of the African men had offered to carry nurse Sharon’s backpack for her and she was grateful for the help. On the way to Akwaya, we passed a home with a spigot out front. Meredith, the sterilization tech, had shampoo in her backpack and we ladies stopped to wash our hair. I can’t imagine doing that in America but we were filthy from the smoke and grime of the village and it felt like heaven to have our hair clean. How we longed for that spigot now, although the water was not safe to drink. We were parched and getting pretty desperate. We passed a swampy area with nasty looking water and Meredith offered her special water bottle. It had cost her $60 and we had teased her about spending so much on it. It was guaranteed to filter out the tiniest microbes. We filled it with swamp water and we all drank from it. We knew this was near suicide but we had to have water! Somewhat refreshed, we trudged on. An older African woman zipped by us carrying a load of wood on her head. It was an amazing sight but a bit demoralizing too. We didn’t have an ounce of energy! Finally, we reached Miyerim and collapsed in our beds and slept for several hours. We waited for the ill effects of the water to take hold but we were all fine! The water bottle that we had laughed at had certainly been a life saver that day.
Dr. Dresden had been offered a ride back to the village by a gendarme (military officer) on a motorcycle but they had an accident as they tried to climb a steep incline. The motorcycle flipped over backwards and Dr. Dresden was thrown off. He suffered several cracked ribs in the fall but didn’t make a big deal out of it. In fact, no one knew at first of his injuries. He also had broken a tooth that was abscessed. We were able to extract it for him but began to be very concerned about him as we learned of his injuries from the accident. He was so excited that he had been able to share the gospel with a number of Hausa speakers in Akwaya that he wasn’t focused on what a rough day he had had.
The numbers of people wanting treatment swelled to nearly a thousand people, and there were only about fifty residents in the little village. Our team was wearing down and all four of the Charleston children were sick in bed with bad coughs. Jack and I were barely sleeping the whole time we were there. The patient load was out of control even though Dr. Loring had finally been able to fly into the village (with the generator for electricity) and help with patient care. We were concerned about the Harmattan situation as well as it was still a problem and we weren’t sure if we would be picked up on our scheduled departure date. It was around this time that Nurse Sharon discovered that a good bit of money was missing from her backpack and we had to sadly conclude that it could only have been taken by the man who had offered to carry it for her. Our endurance was being stretched to the breaking point and we were begging the Lord for grace. We weren’t sure we could handle many more challenges but we didn’t have much choice.
The Charleston family’s girls were seemingly worse instead of better with their illness, Dr. Dresden was in obvious discomfort, the line of patients was getting longer by the day and all of us were beyond exhausted. There was no way we could treat all of the people who were coming for care. There were also reports of bandits in the area who had molested some of the village people. We were not sure why all of this was happening, when our heart’s desire was to help! On future trips we would recognize the trouble that sometimes comes as spiritual opposition but for now the difficulties were making it hard to see the good that was being done.
But there was good that was happening! Hundreds of people were having their longstanding physical needs addressed! And most importantly the gospel was being preached every day in Miyerim! Hundreds of people had crowded into that village for medical and dental care but they were hearing the message that could save their souls! People, who had most likely never heard that they could have their sin debt cancelled by Jesus’ sacrifice of His life, had the opportunity to be saved. Pastor Jacque and others faithfully preached during the clinic hours to those waiting and then to those who attended the evangelistic services at night. Not only that, but the difficulties of that trip toughened us for future service, taught us lessons we needed to learn about culture and people and bonded many of us together in lifelong friendships. We did our very best for the people of the Akwaya region and when we had to leave, we gave away many of our belongings, vitamins, medicines, toothbrushes, empty containers and pieces of rope, whatever could be used, to those we were not able to treat. We wished we could have done more but we look forward in hope, of seeing some of those folks in heaven. Hearing of Christ was the greatest gift we could give them.
We thank the Lord for bringing us there, difficult though it was, and using us to help people learn of Him. It is a trip we will never forget! God helped us through each problem that arose, (and there were many!) and got us home safely afterward. None of us had any ill effects from the things we were exposed to. Only God could do that in such a place. What a mighty God we serve!