Medical Mission #1

The medical mission. What can I say? Only that if we’d been on the Apprentice, Lord Sugar would have had us in the boardroom for a severe talking to. Who was the project manager – actually that wasn’t very obvious, as we thought the Kanlungan team were leading! Our supposed leader (Andrew –aka Dad) was dispatched to find additional medicines which meant hopping on various Jeepneys and visiting what seemed like most of the generic pharmacies in the area, mostly to no avail. To be honest our team seemed to have bought up every pack of multi vitamins going.

Back at the Day Centre, things weren’t working out quite as planned. The team thought that we’d got through most of the patients. Except that at least 30 of them were sitting in the room where Dr Chris was trying to hold the surgery. Suffice it to say it’s hard to hear a dodgy chest when there’s loads of children crying and chatting in the background. Eventually, Brown Owl (aka Debbie) took on the role of the fierce receptionist, shooing out most of the patients downstairs so that Dr Chris could get on with her work.

By mid afternoon, there was nothing for most of us to do so we left Dr Chris and Debbie to it, only to discover that they were still hard at it hours later. So what happened? Seems like word had got around about Dr Chris’ excellent clinic. So various other people who hadn’t been scheduled to turn up did so and they just got let in. Eventually, after 7pm, the clinic finished. By which time the rest of the team had returned from visiting various street people in the surrounding area. Some of them we’d seen at the medical mission earlier in the day so it was nice to stop and chat to them, with translation provided by the wonderful Kanlungan staff. We met a lady with several children that Dr Chris had seen earlier on. All of her worldly possessions were in a cart, and the children slept in there at night. A real eye opener for us. Life there seemed unimaginable as we returned to the comfort of the Shalom hotel.

God bless, Andrew.