The Clinic at Danja

We are starting to settle into life in Danja. I (Ruth) started work in the hospital last Monday and I am learning the different needs and priorities here. Danja is different from Galmi – the clinic here is more similar to a GP surgery back home, in that patients often don’t need to be admitted. Many of them have long term problems that they come here to receive treatment for.

A large bulk of the patients are people with long term wounds that aren’t healing well from leprosy, diabetes or nerve damage after accidents. Mark, the GP here, can do minor surgery to clean out wounds and dress them, and can do skin grafting as well. He’s hoping to be able to teach me more about this over the next few weeks. I have a lot to learn.

There are about ten medical beds where we can admit sick children or adults for IV medicines and observation over several days. If people are very unwell or require specialist investigations or assessment we can refer them to the government hospital in Maradi. There are two wards specifically for patients with leprosy who come here for wound care and physiotherapy. These people often need to stay here for several weeks at a time, and so I have already observed the opportunities to be able to get to know these people better.

When we do the ward round each morning one of the evangelists comes with us, and we are able to talk with people about Jesus and pray with them. At the hospital we have a supply of cassettes with the gospel in Hausa which many people are keen to receive and listen to. The opportunity to share with people here and the positive response from patients is really encouraging. Mark has a great grasp of Hausa and so he can talk with each person in their own language.

Peter and I are gradually learning little by little. Our Hausa lessons have been a great help over the past two weeks, and we hope to continue twice weekly after work. We are so thankful for this, and really hope they will enable us to build relationships with people here.

To Danja

Last weekend, we took the plunge and had our first Niger ‘bus experience’ – which actually turned out to be fairly bearable, once on the road! Air-conditioning, seats beside each other and a disappointing lack of livestock: some kind of luxury, surely. And at only 2500 CFA each – about £3.50 for a couple of hundred kilometres. Take note, Translink.

Our arrival at Danja has been a relaxed and gentle one! Our house here is not quite ready, so we’ve been staying in the compound’s guesthouse, but as hot season heightens to temperatures of 45 degrees, the air-conditioner in the room softens the blow more than a little! We seem to have picked a quiet time to turn up at Danja, as several of the folk here are currently either at a conference or away on holiday. Some return soon, but it may be next month before we really get to settle down and see everyone properly. However, we’ve already heard and seen a lot about the different ministries happening here, and the opportunities to get involved around the compound, hospital and church. We would appreciate your prayers as we organise our time here and look to where we can be more involved in outreach.

In building relationships with the local people, we and the staff here felt it was important we took some more time to focus on learning Hausa and so this week has been given over to Hausa study. Each day, we have been meeting with a local teacher for a two hour lesson and then spending the afternoon working through what we have learnt. It is quite intense, but we are covering a lot of ground which is good. We hope to continue these lessons with our teacher twice a week over the next months. Hausa is a very different type of language in many ways: though the idea of nouns having gender is similar to European languages, the tenses work very differently. The verb will change only a little, but it’s the pronouns (I, You, He, She) that change depending on past, present, future and so on. Initially, this makes it seem like there is less vocabulary to learn: but remembering which slight variation on the pronoun to use is very difficult! We are so thankful for our teacher’s help, as we were finding the language difficult to master on our own. Please pray that we would be quick and receptive to learn.

On Sunday we made our first visit to the church beside the hospital. The church is attended by a lot of hospital staff and their families. People seemed really enthusiastic and the pastor enjoyed cracking a few jokes. There is another church nearby which meets in Danja village which we hope to visit as well in the next couple of weeks.

The number of missionaries at Danja has really increased over the last six months. When we applied last year, one missionary lady was the only expat working here. Since the start of the year, and particularly with the opening of the Fistula Fund’s specialist clinic, many new staff have come to the site. There are now three organisations – SIM, The Leprosy Mission, and Worldwide Fistula Fund – working together across the same site. There’s obviously going to be a few headaches created by melding together three different international organisations, and the logistics involved in managing the programs simultaneously. That being said, it is exciting and encouraging that these charities have pooled their resources for the work here at Danja, and it feels like the joint effort is ripe to be rewarded.

Food Crisis

Friday brings the due date for another blog post – I (Peter) have been trying to capture a flavour of our orientation trip a while back all week, but it’s now so long, it’s turning into a Greek epic. (Well, less swords…)

The food crisis is something that has brought Niger to the attention of folk back in the UK recently. Our point of view here is slightly different, in that you probably have better streams of information that we do on certain things. However, regardless of how severe the crisis may be, or what exactly the cause is (everything from the Mali situation to poor farming practices) we’ve recently seen evidence that it’s happening.

Generally, large swathes of Niger suffer a food shortage each year. Whether through poor rain, harvest or over-intensive farming, between March-September every year it seems the food just starts to run out. It’s more a question of how severe the shortages are that make the difference between a regular year and the critical ones. That in itself is miserable – people will die, but it has to reach a certain number before it’s a crisis or famine.

We recently spent a few days in Niamey, the capital, and the increase in impoverished folk coming in from the rural areas to beg was noticeable, as was the intensity of their desperation. In Galmi, which is, in comparions, reasonably well off in places thanks to the hospital and passing trade, one will walk down the street and children will occasionally run up and ask for a present. You smile and tell them to ‘have patience’, maybe fork over the odd butter candy, and they’ll run off happily.

Last weekend in Niamey, women and children were following people the length of streets begging. These weren’t boys out collecting for the local m*slim teacher, kitted out with their trademark metal bowl – these were lean, intense looking women earnestly pushing their kids forward with outstretched hands.

As we prepare to move to Danja, I recently had a conversation with the director there about the Danja Food Aid programme (which runs on a food-for-work principle.) We’re pleased that SIM UK have been publicising the project heavily recently, as a wonderful-sounding SIM retiree has undertaken fundraising for it. I asked him how donations to the project were going: inevitably, he replied, when Niger was in the news donations would go up, and so he hoped for help to come in this year; however, once the stories stop, the donations generally drop even though the need remains. A fairly typical story of charity, in a world with so many needs in so many places. It sounds like Danja is bracing itself a little for the needs to be met in the next few months.

Elsewhere in Niger, SIM are already involved in raising support for grain banks, and hopefully that too should help to relieve the strain.

The BBC published an interesting short photo diary to illustrate some aspects of the food shortages, which we’ve purloined straight from Deb’s blog, and would recommend if you have a moment to spare.

And so, regardless of the how’s and why’s, people are hungry and many may die. There’s a fatalistic viewpoint – that that’s just the way it is, or even that it’s God’s will – that we have to avoid. I (Peter again) often found that, on occasion in NI, charity fatigue can set in: it’s like people are always asking for more from us. But the thing we have to remember is that we are in an incredible position. If you have more than, say, two changes of clothes, you are already rich beyond the wildest dreams of many of those here. If you can choose what to eat tonight, you again are privileged. This isn’t to guilt us or make us feel like we’re under attack by worthy causes.

Rather, the realisation has to slowly dawn on us that we have the joyous position of being able to give, and to give in a way where so very little makes such a huge difference. It’s not a burden, it’s a right that we should claim. The right as those at the top to give those at the bottom some help. Not a handout. Not a freebie or a crutch. Just making it a little easier.

SIM Ireland Spring Conference – 27 April 2012

A post not about here, but about there: SIM’s Ireland office are holding there Spring Conference in our own Bloomfield Presbyterian church on Friday 27th April.

The evening is completely free and usually lasts a couple of hours (with, one assumes, some tea in yer hand afterwards, as they say in certain parts.) There’ll be a specific focus on the ministry of SIM in India, but with updates of others from the island of Ireland who are working across the globe. We’d heartily encourage you to go along, particularly if you’ve found our notes home of interest.

Bloomfield church is situated just off the Beersbridge Road in east Belfast, so it’s very easy to get to. A map and directions are available from the church website here.

Any Questions?

Nearly three months in, we hope that if you’ve been following us on our amble into the mission field, you will have found a few things of interest along the road. We already have a few more topics lined up to delve into in more detail, whether here on the blog or in our monthly e-mail update (farming fans, the one we’re working on this week is aimed squarely at you!)

However, we’re aware that as we report home, we still only send little snapshots of a lot of the ways and means of life in Niger. So we thought it might be a good idea to ask readers and supporters: is there anything you’d like to know more about?

Ideally, if you have something you’d like to hear a little more about – for example, a particular area of SIM’s work, or some aspect of life we’ve mentioned or alluded to – please get in touch! We are trying to keep a healthy mix of day-to-day things and bigger topics, and would be really interested to hear what would be useful to share or find out more about. If it’s something we’re not able to answer ourselves, we can try and chase it up with someone else in the SIM family.

If you’d like to suggest something, you can e-mail us (hit “Reply” on any of the prayer letters, for example) or comment on this or any other post on the blog. You can also browse what we’ve written previously, or search for a topic, using some of the tools on the right of this page.