Industrious

As I sat trying to think of a theme or a word that summed up the last few weeks of life and ministry here in The Gambia, “industrious” seemed the most appropriate.  It has been a very busy few weeks with lots going on. Praise God, I did have some helpers here.  Things are in super high speed for the impending clinic transition and with each weekly meeting where we discuss the logistics and practical aspects of the transition my to-do list grows and grows and grows.  Thanks to the help of a team from North Carolina and Texas (AND even one guy from my little home town in California) the building and huge storage rooms with lots of dirt are becoming much less overwhelming.  We had some large bonfires that were a little more exciting than I had hoped for. I was a little too nervous and on alert to video the larger explosions, but here is one of the smaller ones and we definitely put on a show for the neighbor kids.  There remain many shelves to organize, label, clean and inventory, but progress is definitely being made and more help is coming soon.

Praise God, my teammate Joanne will be returning to The Gambia very soon and the team that was here worked very industriously on her house for many hours each day.  And of course, we had our share of WAWA (West Africa Wins Again) moments. She has been gone for a year and her solar worked fine until about 3 weeks ago. All of our local workers troubleshooting could not solve the issue, my troubleshooting did not help, the repair guys that came made no progress and things just kept getting worse.  Praise God these guys that were here visiting in God’s perfect timing are very smart when it comes to electrical things and they identified the problem and we finally have a working system!  I pitched in to “help” a little in preparing the house for Joanne’s return and in an effort to stay out of their way I opened up her pantry to clean it out.  As I sorted through some items that the mice had enjoyed I was very perplexed by huge empty match boxes and at least 6 large empty boxes of tea.  I could tell the mice had clearly enjoyed themselves in her pantry, but had no clue what happened to the matches and tea bags.  And then, I got to the last item to clean out which was a huge metal bowl with a cover.  As I removed the cover to rinse it out I discovered hundreds of matches and dozens of tea bags forming a high rise mouse condo. Praise God, the residents abandoned their fancy new house before I discovered it.  Wow,  talk about industrious! 

There continues to be a lot to do prior to my departure for the US in January and I am getting tired, so keep on praying.   And pray that myself and the mice can be a little less industrious over the next month.