Kevin Raymer

PNG Blog #3

Greetings again from paradise!

I hope this finds you well and in strong relationship with our Lord.

This week has been yet another that I will never forget.  We visited another bush church today, and once again we were not disappointed.  The picture here is of our hike to church.  It was a nice little hike with many spectacular views along the way.  There were also many friendly villagers willing to visit as we trekked the path.  We decided that if we all took this hike every day as the natives do we would likely drop a few pounds and markedly enhance our physique.  Anyway, once we arrived at the church we were warmly greeted by the village.  We sang and worshipped God with many songs in Pidgin as well in the local “tok place.”  As you may know PNG is the most linguistically diverse country on the planet with over 800 distinctly different languages, at last count.  Any one of these distinct languages is referred to as that village’s “tok place.”  If you are not from that village you will most likely have no clue what the natives are trying to tell you.  If you’re lucky someone there will help you out by speaking Pidgin.  Pidgin originated during an era when a thousands of PNG natives were promised work, wages, and housing in various European colonies.  Upon arrival they found the promises to be lies and the work to be demanding.  They were basically slaves.  While in these conditions they were under the influence of various European commands and the languages of the respective countries.  Pidgin soon developed as a hodge-podge of many different languages including English, German, and about a dozen others.  When the natives returned to PNG they found that they could communicate with people from other villages and the language then became more refined and recognized as a legitimate language.  So anyway, you can kind of wrestle your way through a conversation with someone who knows Pidgin. Enough of that and back to our church expedition.

Church here is unique in many ways.  First of all, the women sit on one side and the men sit on the other.  Secondly, all the children attend church with the adults.  I have found this an especially refreshing difference from church back home.  Thirdly, you typically sit on the ground or on a low level plank of wood.  They also tend to worship with an incredibly pure heart.  The come to the Lord, as all Christians are asked to do, with a child-like heart.  Praising with all their hearts, realizing that church is much more than a fancy building with fancy people wearing fancy clothes.  It’s the simplicity of their hearts that I feel we have much to learn from.  This is what I think “church” was intended to be, simple and focused on God.

Prior to leaving the church the villagers made sure that every one of them shook our hands.  They also filled our pockets with bananas and sugar fruit.  The sugar fruit is something worthy of a little explanation as well.  It’s a relative of the passion fruit, which is also here in PNG, and it’s about the size of a large chicken egg.  It has a tough but thin skin and a white cotton-like layer under the exterior.  Inside are a bunch of slimy seeds.  When you eat it, you crack open the exterior and then suck out all of the seeds.  At first contact it’s somewhat unusual, but then you realize that the fruit’s name holds true in taste, and you dive in to suck out some more seeds!

Let’s see, what else should I share with you all?  Well, work at the hospital was yet again eventful.  We did three c-sections this week, and one was on breech/breech twins.  They primarily do vertical skin incisions here, but the rest of the procedure is just how we do it back home.  When I was on call Friday night we had a woman who was 30 weeks pregnant come in with severe preeclampsia.  We basically went about our usual admission as we would back home with the consideration that it would be difficult for us to properly care for a 30 week gestation baby after delivery.  But when I explained the order sheet to the nurses, they seemed to be a bit confused about giving magnesium sulfate IV.  So, I assumed this must be a new practice here and proceeded to calculate how much magnesium needed to be in each bag of normal saline fluid and how fast to give it in order to achieve our goal of preventing the progression of her diagnosis to full eclampsia, including seizure activity.  It really took quite a while to get it all explained.  The next morning I was checking out to the oncoming on-call doc, and I relayed my experience to her.  She chuckled a bit and made me aware that they give all of their magnesium intramuscularly here!  Whoops…..that sure was a lot of unnecessary work for me, oh well.  We also had our fair share of orthopedic cases this week.  We reduced a couple humerus fractures, casted several ulna fractures, and reduced a hip that had been dislocated for 5 weeks!  I also think I’ve been seeing some patients with various filarial diseases, but we have no dependable way to diagnose these diseases except with physical exam and response to adequate treatment.  Hopefully I’ll be able to hone my tropical medicine skills in the next few weeks.  Well, it was definitely an exciting week at the hospital, and I’m looking forward to yet another.

I guess that is plenty for now.

“Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you.”  Acts 3: 6

In HIM>

KKR.