Members of our team starting their day with some grub.

Vehicular traffic is prohibited on Saturday mornings in Burundi before 10:30 am so that the nation’s citizens can focus on local community service projects. So in order to travel to Bubanza early in the morning our team actually had to receive a special exemption from the President’s office that our driver was able to present at the military checkpoints along the route.

The team van getting ready to pull off.

Once again the first priority of the day was to determine the number of patients who could be see in order to send away anyone who we couldn’t see. The government program hosting our student volunteers was having their closing ceremony at 1pm; so we had only planned to do a half day of ministry starting at 9am.

The team rushing to setup the clinic.

Turning people away is always difficult so we had a question and answer session so that everyone would understand that we really wanted to stay longer but couldn’t. We took as many questions as possible and explained the reasons why we had to leave. Then we prayed and asked the Lord to heal their diseases. We also asked them to pray for us so that we would have a chance to come back Monday; that’s the last chance that we will have to offer our services during this trip.

Once we discharged everyone we couldn’t help we began to focus our attention on the remaining patients. We were just starting to get into the swing of things when we received a surprise visit from a very important guest!

The President of Burundi really did pay us a visit.

Yes, that is our team posing for a photo with the Honorable Piere Nkurunziza, President of the Republic of Burundi. He was the guest of honor at the closing reception for our student volunteers at 1pm. Since he was in the neighborhood he decided to pay us a visit about two hours before that ceremony began. He greeted the missionaries in our group whom had visited Burundi in November 2008 and then spoke to our team leader for a few minutes about the work we were doing. After a few more minutes of greeting his people he asked us to come outside and pose for a photo with him.

The rest of the day was a bit quieter because we didn’t have to worry about patient intake once everyone had been dismissed. We worked hard, had a few light moments, had a few difficult moments; but all in all the day went well. Here are some highlights from the days events.

One man came in having just fallen off of his motorcycle. His left arm was in an awkard position and he was unable to move it. After a quick examination one of our doctors determined that he had dislocated his shoulder and that it needed to be snapped back into place. The doctor wrapped a very strong cloth around the patients upper body. Next an interpreter held onto the cloth while another team member helped the patient stay on the table. The doctor pulled for about ten  seconds, the patient winced and the shoulder popped back in place. After wrapping the arm in makeshift sling we were able to release the patient.

On man came into the clinic to see the doctor two years after hurting his right foot. Apparently he had wounded it by hitting it against a piece of wood with something sharp attached. The wound never healed. Although he had gone to a local doctor and tried to heal it with herbal medicine it had progressively gotten worse to the point where the bone was exposed. The doctor cleaned the wound and prescribed some antibiotics. The patient was very thankful and praising God for receiving medicine for the first time in two years so the doctor recommended that a team member pray for him. We did pray with him to accept Jesus into his life; and we also asked for the Lord to heal him completely.

An open wound being treated.

Several other patients at the clinic came to know about having a personal relationship with Jesus in other ways. For example at one point a patient wanted to know more about Jesus so a team member was assigned to answer any questions that he had and to pray with him. As the team member talked with this man at the bench where he was sitting several other patients joined into the conversation. When the team member asked who wanted to start a new relationship with Jesus all of the patients on the bench said yes!

The team praying with patients.

Everyone in our team found it easy to love the people of Bubanza. I could try to write about it but these cases a picture is really worth a thousand words.

This little girl captured his heart.

A team member falls in love with a family.

Here’s a funny story. Many of the children in Bubanza have never seen a non-African before. (The local word that is used to describe us is muzungu).  Not to mention the fact that children all over the world hate going to see the doctor. This explains why our Filipino doctor had a hard time seeing pediatric patients. They would start screaming violently and running away when they saw her. However most of these children have never their photo in a digital camera either. So she developed the technique of taking their picture with her digital camera and showing it to them until they calmed down.

Our Filipino doctor trying to calm down the children.

After three full days of working in Bubanza (2 half days and 2 full days) our official time of ministry has ended. We haven’t had chance to tally the number of patients we helped but I would guess that we treated anywhere between 300 and 400 patients. We closed up the clinic with the hope that we’d be able to reopen it on Monday. However the Lord showed us that we would have one at least one last family from Bubanza to take care of.