At 10:00 this morning the temperature was already 100 degrees with a heat index of 103 degrees. The afternoon high was 106 degrees. Even Zorash was complaining about the heat when she came to the mission house this afternoon. She said that she needed to buy some meat for supper but it was too hot to go out into the sun. She said that since she needed to pick up the money to send to the mother in Tamale, she would use the trip to the mission house to stop and buy her meat. I volunteered to take the money to her.
The baby that needs the money is the one the doctors in Tamale are testing to see if he is blind and deaf. The parents need more medicine for the child. We told them that we needed to know what kind of medicine they were giving. This is the baby they are shining a flashlight covered with a yellow cloth into his eyes 3 times a day. We have Googled it and there is a light therapy they use a flashlight and a yellow cloth onto the wall to help strengthen the eyes if they are crossed or one is weak. It is to encourage the baby to track with his eyes but from everything we have read it is dangerous to shine a light directly into the baby’s eyes even if it is covered with a yellow cloth. We are afraid the mother might have misunderstood what the doctor wanted her to do; Zorash talked to the mother and she said that she is following the doctor’s instructions exactly. She encouraged her to talk to the doctor and make sure. The mother took pictures of the baby’s medicine today, one is Baclofen to help the muscles relax, one is an anti-seizure medication. The baby also received antibiotics, Tylenol and liquid multivitamins with iron. We asked Zorash if the baby had seizures. She said that the mother has never complained about the baby having seizures. She is going to ask when she sends the mother the money for this last batch of medicine and the testing. The baby has been diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy. None of the health care providers seems to want to tell the parents what is wrong with the baby. They just keep doing tests and wasting the family resources. Of course, with every new test and every new medicine the parents think their baby is going to get well. So sad!
Timothy Niligrini got a call from Nana Bekum, the evangelist we are supposed to go visit on Sunday up in the Chereponi District. Nana said that one of his brothers’ sons was killed in a motorcycle accident in Accra. Now Timothy did not know if this was his real brother, half-brother, uncle, cousin or village brother’s son because they use brother very loosely. Anyway, the family is bringing the funeral from Accra to Nana’s village and he called to ask us to postpone our trip to later in the month because there would be too many strangers in the village for the funeral. They call it bringing the funeral to his village. They do not bring the corpse; after the burial in Accra the family and friends will all get together and hire a bus to bring them to Nana’s village. They will usually spend a week and have another funeral celebration. A funeral can be carried to several different villages before it is considered finished. But this will not be the final funeral. For the people in our area, they will have the final funeral in 1, 2,3 etc. years’ time whenever the family has gathered enough money to have it, then they will have the final funeral. Timothy Niligrini’s family is performing the final funeral of both his mother and father this year. His dad died 3 years ago and I am not sure how many years ago his mother died. Funerals are killing these people financially!
Take care, keep us in your prayers. Please!
In HIS Service,
Steve, Kandie and Skeeter
The Monkeyshines
I aggravated Mom mercilessly today! I figured out how to unplug her sewing machine! It is attached to a transformer and in the past, I have not been strong enough to move the transformer and she would wedge it against the wall under her sewing table but today I figured out that if I yank really hard I can pull the whole transformer out from under the table and unplug her machine! I am so clever! I unplugged it dozens of times. Mom is afraid that I will get shocked. Dad said, “Good, maybe Skeeter will learn to leave it alone!” Now what kind of a dad would say a thing like that? The other thing I did to aggravate Mom was to grab that thing that she puts her foot on to make the machine go. I would watch her so closely and when she took her foot off it, I would grab it and take off. I wish it had a longer cord! Sometimes when she was sewing, I would try to get it from under her foot by pulling on the cord! Mom is still stronger than I am and she could keep that foot feed thing under her foot but it did not keep me from trying! I bet there is going to be duct tape in my future. I think that she is going to figure a way to duct tape that plug in the transformer so I can’t unplug it. Then I will have to find another source of entertainment!
If you have any good ideas of how to aggravate Mom send them my way!
Love, Skeeter
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