Ya ya yo?

Ya ya yo church, family and friends?
This is Hausa for 'How are you?'"

Last we went to Evangel Hospital and participated in rounds on the paediatric ward. Most kids here seem to have illness that we give regular immunizations for at home so it was a bit of an eye opener. Plus there were many children with malaria and typhoid. We plan to started our surgical rotation this week and also plan to be involved with Women's ministries every Wednesday by attending the women's clinic and lending our nursing skills to the nurse who overseas it. The clinic predominately sees street women and widows who have very little resources and support. Most of these women are Muslins. Despite the good work the clinic is doing in supporting these women, they are low on resources. We have been encouraged to buy our stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs so that we can do assessments on the women as there are not enough at the clinic. Then once we leave we can leave these supplies behind as a donation to the clinic. We were hoping that you our supporters might be interested in helping us with this financial need.

We also recently returned from a medical/spiritual outreach to a small remote town called Kafarma 3 hours away from Jos with an mission organization called City Missions. As many of the mission organizations here work closely together, we meet a rep from City Missions who offered us to oppertunity to participate in this outreach. We left early Monday morning, camped overnight in the village, ran two days of medical clinic and spiritual counselling and then returned Tuesday night. Although the team we worked with were amazing and the villagers incredible kind and engaging, overall the spiritual needs in this village are still very great. Though many of the villagers attend church most still continue to practice their pagan traditional beliefs. As such there is much confusion about the gospel, limited understanding about Jesus or the Christian life and thus much conflict between the villagers. The resources to reach out to the town are limited and the team that went is only able to go once a year for two days of outreach. As such the town is in spiritual turmoil. Again we would ask our supporters at home to commit to praying for this village.

Other than that, we are in good health....except for being in a permanent state of sweatiness and often covered with a fine layer of dirt due the harmatten winds that blow the soil all over the place (its the dry season). Although we've only been here a short time, we feel we have already grown in our understanding of different cultures, our dependence on the Father and our appreciation for the wonderful heart and generosity of the Nigerian people.

Love Lisa and Rachel