A New Day and New Life

Here's a few more and better pictures from yesterday 

The last one is the men in Didier's churches, but with better lighting than what I posted yesterday.

Today (Saturday) I got to visit church 5, the new church plant that meets in this outside "hangar" and is led by Pastor Judex. His wife Claudine is the one who made the African shirts we received in above pictures.

Saturday we also visited the clinic to meet with Doctor Bill (not to be confused with Dr. Phil we clarified). We met to discuss ways to legally protect the clinic and expand its operations with an overseeing doctor who has a general practice and more years of experience and knows how to work with partners and insurance. Right now the clinic has a small pharmacy and laboratory where they can test for and treat malaria and typhoid and some malnutrition and common diseases. With a few hundred more a month they may be able to expand and improve their operations and they hope to be able to purchase an ultrasound / sonagram machine (about $2000 but may need to upgrade their solar panels as well). The onsite doctor's specialty is labor and delivery and Didier said most days of the week they have at least one delivery. Today there were twins born and their custom is to do loud dancing and singing with drums for the father of twins and then they dump baby powder all over him. Quite an experience and then they started singing to the white man.

Dr. Bill is the one next to me above. Then when we got home tonight we got to see another new life, a baby born just yesterday and the mom traveled from a ways away by public transport to have Didier pray God's blessing on this new life. The proud grandpa was one of the pastors of his churches (Modeste).

The mother of the newborn didn't look like she had just given birth and Didier commented that African women are very strong. He said with one of their children Annie gave birth at 4 AM and checked herself out of the hospital 9 hours later and was cooking that night and everything back to normal.

It was a wonderful day to spend some time having fun playing with the orphanage children, and especially to see these new lives, and to see renewed spiritual lives this week. Praying for a blessed Lord's day tomorrow