Yesterday the South African couple picked up two single Dutch girls from the airport who were going to visit for a month to learn more about "the mission field." The Dutch girls couldn't speak 5 words of English, so we left them in the care of the South African couple... who couldn't speak Dutch, but who spoke Afrikaans, which is a very loose type of Dutch, so they could mostly communicate. Mostly.
The four of them went out to dinner last night and the sweet Dutch girl, who was so excited about getting to ride a motorcycle, stepped backwards to take a picture of the bike and promptly fell into a drainage ditch.
Ah, the drainage ditches here... how to describe them? They are narrow, 3 feet deep, cement... and the catch-all for all things nasty. No trash can? Throw it in the drainage ditch. No bathroom nearby? Use the drainage ditch. Building a house and can't afford a septic system? Plumb the dirty water into the drainage ditch.
So on top of smelling revolting and ruining her pants, the poor girl suffered a nasty cut in her hand. Small, but very deep and bleeding profusely. They brought her back to the guest house whereupon the circus of trying to translate tropical wound care from English to Afrikaans to Dutch began.
I brought out the hydrogen peroxide, iodine, anti-bacteria gel, band-aids.... how do you translate all that? I ended up opening up the band-aid to actually show what it was and Brant tried in vain to explain that hydrogen peroxide would "burn" but not actually burn off your skin.... I am still not sure that they knew what the iodine was... but she accidentally poured it on her pants... which meant two pairs of pants ruined in one evening ....And that's life on the mission field.
In the course of the "conversation" it came up that the girl had never had a tetanus shot. Out come the medical books to determine how long we had to track down a tetanus shot before her jaw started locking up. Do you know what the Afrikaans word for Tetanus is? Something like calamari. I never did learn what the Dutch word was.
Tetanus is a very real and present danger here. We had a national friend die a very painful, brutal death about 6 months ago from Tetanus. Left behind a wife and 3 young kids. Opting out of vaccines in nice clean, healthy countries like America or Holland is one thing, but here the diseases they prevent are very real threats and you opt out at great risk.
So at ten o'clock last night when we were feeling we were beating our heads against a wall trying to communicate, we called our good friend here in town who is Dutch, but who speaks excellent English. We explained the whole situation to him, who in turn spent half an hour on the phone with the Dutch girls chewing them out for never having gotten a Tetanus vaccine before they got on the plane. I think "my friend died a painful death from Tetanus and I watched him suffer" came into the conversation as their eyes got really wide.
Then we had a long discussion about penicillin class drugs vs. tetracycline class drugs, which with a Dutch accent "cillin" and "cycline" sound almost the same. In case you're not up on your tropical wound care... you can take high doses of amoxicillin and hope for the best if you cannot get a Tetanus vaccine in time... not a fool proof treatment, but better than nothing.
So at midnight last night Brant and I fell into bed totally exhausted. Half laughing because of the hilarity of the communication blunders of the evening. Half crying because of the seriousness of the situation and the fear and pain the girl was going through.
Welcome to the mission field. Don't ever come without your vaccines. Or extra pants.
No comments:
Post a Comment