VIMM Visits Sudan
This Volunteers in Medical Missions team was comprised of seven members from California, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina—including three doctors, two nurses, a nurse’s aide and a computer consultant. The team was led by Dr. Richard Fry.
Our mission to share Christ’s love was two-fold: running daily clinics and helping take care of patients in the primitive hospital. In the clinics, we chased out goats and bats. We encountered both language and cultural barriers. Translators helped with the language problem, and we worked our way through cultural surprises.
We taught younger women about the best time of their cycle to get pregnant, older women about menopause and men about having one woman, not multiple partners. We treated muscular problems common in people who do hard labor, respiratory problems in people who worked beyond their capabilities just to survive, and skin problems in people who don’t practice good hygiene. We saw the ravages of untreated leprosy, the sores of sexually transmitted diseases, and the problems of undiagnosed cancer.
In the hospital, we saw 15 patients with gunshot wounds, a young woman with status epilepticus, and what Rich described as the most difficult and traumatic delivery of his 30 years in obstetric practice, in which he saved the lives of a mother and one twin. The second twin was dead before he was called.
Hospital patients lie in 12-bed wards. They used buckets because there weren’t bathrooms. They only ate if their families brought them food because there were no food services. Although we met some dependable nurses, other times we discovered nurses frequently were either absent or sleeping when we went on 10 p.m. medical rounds.
The most dramatic case of the mission involved a young man who had been shot in the right ankle four days earlier. We were walking out of the clinic when we saw four of this man’s friends carrying him to the hospital. When we put him on a bed and removed the fly-infested rag, we found his foot was nearly off. We saw his fibula bone sticking out, dead tissue and various fluids and blood oozing out. We lacked clean water, but had tea, which we initially used to clean out the area. Our three doctors operated on him by flashlight, using lidocaine in the gaping hole, Valium intravenously and a lot of prayers. Somehow, we kept him alive through the mission. He tolerated the excruciating dressing changes well.
Life was harsh—no bathrooms or showers for eight days—yet this team bonded like a family. We dealt with the nightly frog invasion—hundreds of little frogs hopped around us and even hopped under our mosquito nets—and torrential rain that turned the outdoors into the world’s biggest mud puddle that made us feel as though we were walking in quicksand.
We left behind hundreds of pounds of medicine and supplies and agreed to bring two of the worst gunshot patients to Nairobi—the man who we suspected would lose his right foot and another man with a severed rectum. The men were brought to the plane, one carried about two miles on his friend’s shoulders.
This team found it especially difficult to say goodbye after we shared such intense experiences together. But we have no doubt we’ll be together again on future mission trips.
