Sister and Baby

These are a couple of pictures I took at the Egyptian hospital on Saturday. The pediatrics clinic is a one room afair. Because of cultural norms here, girls are seen as patients on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Boys are seen on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. The translator has been teaching me some basic essential words so I can at least find out the basic reasons they have come for help -- the language thing is going slow but it helps a lot. The first picture is just of a young girl who brought her little brother in for care. She, like most all these kids, seemed very mature for her age. Her brother was fine. She would have had to come by 8 am, wait outside and then compete with the other 160-200 patients crowding around the building to try to get in. Not a typical day for a young girl her age. She was just as determined as she looks in the picture. Life here makes for strong women.
The boy below was brought in by his mother. She just asked why he was so short. This seemed like an odd question until she said he was fourteen years old. Dr. Hani and I looked him over and discovered he had a cardiac anomaly with a phenomenal heart murmur. All we could do to assess him was talk, examine and get an EKG. We surmised he has a serious congenital aortic valvular problem. He's always tired and the condition has clearly stunted his growth. Of all the things we learned, the most shocking was that this was the first time the boy had ever seen a doctor for any reason at all.

Little Bear FARMING!

It has warmed up here for a while so we decided to start planting. Little bear tells me the soil here is TERRIBLE! He got some tomato seeds and planted them -- some in a little spot of good soil that came in a package from home and then he planted some in the best soil we could find. Well...what can I say? The pictures tell it all. The Afghani soil tomato is tiny compared to the one in good soil.

We hunted around for a long time to get some kind of pot to plant the good tomato starts in -- and we finally got some big plastic jugs from the chow hall. I think they held cooking oil before. Now they are planters. The medics say that coffee grounds make the soil better for growing so we add coffee grounds every morning -- I say ANYTHING would improve the soil here!

Ryan

So, these pics are more for Craig than anyone. Looks like Ryan is doing pretty well...drugged up and all! :) See Mom's email below to get more details on the injury. Basically, for anyone who hasn't already heard, Ryan went to visit his friends at Fabulous Freddy's (the car wash where he works) and he decided to put air in his tire. You can see from the pictures that the rim pretty much exploded at him. The innertube of the tire also blew up, but (go figure) the tire is pretty much intact. We really are lucky that he didn't get hit in the head or anywhere else. Anyway, see Mom's email below:

Well, the “Big Dude” is resting good since they started the morphine! He underwent a long surgery that lasted about 5 hours. Basically, he cut 4 or 5 tendons, broke his hand’s big bone and crushed the knuckle. There are 3 screws holding the break together, bone grafting and tons of stitches. It scared the crap out of him and everyone else at the Fabulous Freddy’s Car wash where he works. He says his ego is injured! He’ll be in the hosp. another 3-4 days and then moved to a rehab place. The Dr.’s are taking good care of him. It will be a long road to recovery and he will have to be careful not to undo the work that was done. He does have a HUGE guardian angel !!!

Thanks to all of you for calling and caring about Ryan. He is always in there making me humble myself to ask for help from above.

Love, Mom

What's it really like?

What is life like here? It's one thing for me to describe it -- it's another to hear about it straight from the official record. I've been reading over the official Afghani government plans for development. This below is just a little excerpt from the development plan:

The health status of the approximately 24 million Afghans, particularly women and children remains among the worst in the world. The country is decades behind its South Asian neighbors on key health indicators such as life expectancy; infant-, under-5 and maternal mortality; and total fertility rates. Afghan children suffer from widespread chronic malnutrition, with over half of Afghan children 6-59 months of age having stunted growth. This is accompanied by widespread micronutrient deficiency; 51% of children 7-11 year old suffer from moderate or severe iodine deficiency. Despite these problems, Afghanistan has the highest total fertility rate in Asia with the average woman expected to have 6.8 children during her reproductive life. This is more than twice as high as the average of South Asia. Most of the burden of disease results from infectious causes, particularly among children where diarrhea, acute respiratory infections, and vaccine preventable illnesses account for nearly 60% of deaths. The high rates of infectious disease reflect poor personal hygiene, limited access to clean water, inappropriate sanitation, and low level of parental education, indicating the need for a broad based assault on poor health.

My door

These are some pictures of the fine engineering somebody put together to make my door close on its own. Cool, eh? My theory is that the guy didn't have enough wood for an entire door so he had to make a bat-wing door. Anyway...that's what I have. The wood pieces don't fit together well but duct tape can fix anything!!!! And what duct tape doesn't fix didn't need fixin' in the first place. This is how most all of our doors close -- weight on a string. Not bad, eh?

Little Bear Photo Ops :)

Little Bear has been out and about again! He had dinner with some colleages here. Going from top on down there are: Daddy...up on the roof -- hanging out with Little Bear and Bro. Russell and enjoying the view of the mountains.

Next is Little Bear with CW2 Faatolia and CW4 Sorenson...havin' dinner.

Next is Little Bear and I again.

Next is Little Bear with MAJ Bain-Gibson and MAJ Siler...he loves all that juice we ahve here.

In the last picture I could hardly get Little bear to look up from his dinner -- loved the pork chops that night...and MAJ Hargrow was great company too. He's such a socialite.

Smoothies

I don't have a picture for this one...but just a ramble. My job is different every day. I get called and asked questions or get tasks I would have never imagined could ever come up. Sometimes it's tedious. Sometimes it's cool. Sometimes it's just plain good.

The other day I was just tracking a Soldier who had been injured. He was on his way home. He had already had surgery and was recovering. He was just here waiting for a flight to get back home. I checked in on him to see if we could do anything to help him out. I did the usual stuff, checking over his medical management (and finding as always that he was getting great care), reminding the nurses to get him a DVD player to pass the time and just talking with him. Because he had oral surgery I thought I'd get him an upgrade from hospital jello and find him a smoothie. We actually have a dairy queen just down the road so I got him a smoothie. Then I looked around the room and realized that there were other Soldiers there who would probably want one too. So I got smoothies. I got smoothies and sat around and talked with these young men who are out here doing one of the toughest jobs around. Four young men, smiling, joking and sipping -- in spite of all manner of bruises, swelling, pain, sutures and fixation devices. They were a really banged up bunch but their spirits were up.

This is good duty.

The Afghani medical system....

The more I'm here, the more I hear of opportunities to be involved in medical care for the Afghani people. There's a hospital here run by the Egyptian army and there's another run by Koreans. Lately I've been at the Egyptian hospital. It's unbelievable. Their pediatrics clinic is where I work because they can use the most help. there's no line outside but just a huge mass of people trying to get in. All the mothers are in burkas. Kids of all ages are there. Some are really poor...others cleary are not. There's no possiblity of doing things like I usually do -- there are too many people, there's too little time and everything is done with a translator. Most kids are fine...mom seems to feel better knowing sombody checked her child out though. And even if they are not sick there's often a box of used shoes or whatnot so kids get shoes, moms get cloth diapers, etc...But there's plenty of disease. Yesterday I saw plenty of the usual -- diarrhea, ear infections, eye infections, skin infections, atopic dermatitis, typical upper respiratory infections, viral syndromes, etc. We also saw a lot of children failing to thrive with poor weight gain. But I also saw juvenile rhuematoid arthritis, leishmaniasis, thallasemia major, pellagra, hydrocephaly, icthyosis, and a few other things I've never seen before and I have no idea what they are. I would love to just take a picture of the crowd of faces and burka's trying to come through the door and put it up on the site here. It just doesn't seem right to whip out my camera and start taking pictures there --maybe sometime I will. This little guy here is a kid from another province that I heard about via e-mail who may have fibrous dysplasia or mccune albright syndrome...couldn't get any help from the Afghani hospital (if you have money you can always get help at a private hospital but the public hospitals are still being developed and can't always help). I passed this picture along to the docs at the Egyptian hospital and they told me to send him over...two days later I saw him there and he's being evaluated. We'll see what happens. At any rate, what can be done will be done.