The clinic officially started at 1pm and ended at 5pm. The medical team and other volunteers started off by singing a song which says “There’s no one like Jesus” in Kirundi to the people who had arrived for treatment. We explained to everyone that it was our commitment to the teachings of Jesus that had lead us to setup the clinic; but we also told them that we would only be able to provide temporary relief for a few of the people in the camp. We also let them know that we would not be able to treat all of their medical issues although we would do our best to help. Finally we challenged and encouraged the people to get to know Jesus for themselves personally so that He could provide solutions for all of their problems long after we had left.

Most of the patients were mothers and their children. We also saw a few older women without children and several teenagers. All in all the team saw about 100 patients representing 34 families with ages ranging from 3 months old to 70 years old. Unfortunately we were not able to see everyone; quite a few people had to be turned away.

The majority of the complaints that the doctors were able to treat were upper respiratory tract infections, fevers, runny noses, worm imfestations, and fungal skin infections.

A number of patients had conditions that simply couldn’t be treated. For example a number of patients needed eyeglasses. One child had an extremely large hole in his heart that requires surgery; this family asked our group to pray for the Lord Jesus to heal the child and we did. Another patient had a huge dental abcess that required a tooth to be pulled; but all that the team could do was prescribe antibiotics to treat the infection. Another patient had pain and a deformity in his arm due to an obvious fracture that had never been set properly over ten years ago; had it been set properly then it would have been absolutely normal today but as it is today nothing can be done for him.

Illiteracy is a major problem in this area of Burundi; thus it was quite difficult for our nurse to explain the proper procedures to ensure that the medicines we prescribed were taken properly.

In one case a nursing mother came in with baby in tow and was prescribed a liquid medication. As a volunteer attempted to pour the medicine into her mouth some of it spilled on her and the baby immediately tried to drink it. It turned out that this poor woman had not had water for a day or two; so her nursing child was extremely hungry. Their crops were destroyed by rebels less than three weeks ago.

The chief of a clan of people came into the clinic just as it was closing. He had tried to quit smoking on his own several times but realized that he had been unable to do so. However he had recently come to understand that Jesus could break the power of this addiction in his life; so he came to our medical clinic and asked the team to pray for him.

Now that we have one day under our belt the team is planning to head to Bubanza early so that we can see more patients than we saw today. Once again I hope to have some pictures tomorrow; but broadband is *very* slow here at the hotel so uploading photos has been a challenge thus far.