Niger report 3

(Anita McCormick--Lutherhaven's Office Manager--and her husband, Cal, are working in Danja, Niger, West Africa, on the edge of the Sahara Desert all summer, where it's a ba-zillion degrees.)

June 21

Dear All,

Cal's crew continues to work hard on a couple of projects. They have completed the foundation for the house and have brought in fill material with wheel borrows and carts. The dump truck broke down, so some teenage boys from a nearby school were rounded up to do the project by hand. It took them a day and a half and it was ridiculously hot! The interior walls were formed up and the rough plumbing is nearly complete. Plans are to pour the house slab next week.

Cal and his digger and cement men are also working on a sidewalk at the Fistula Hospital. It runs from the hospital to the kitchen where patient food is prepared. This is an outside kitchen where women prepare traditional African food for the patients that will now be able to be transported via a cart on the new sidewalk.

My primary role is "wife of the contractor," which is actually the best. I make sure Cal keeps hydrated, eats (which is much more involved than you may think: making sure you use purified water, bleaching fruits & veggies, sifting flour, making goats milk yogurt, checking to make sure the eggs are good, figuring out packaging written in French ... you get the picture!) I continually ask him to be careful in the sun and do laundry. I have the sweatiest husband ever!

I work with the ladies who have applied to be employed on the cleaning crew, and did we ever bust it out! Ashley the Operating Room nurse and I each had a translator and some women to clean every inch of the hospital. Nothing like you would think: imagine strong winds and sand storms blowing through inadequate windows. Someone said, "Sand is like the wind, it goes wherever it wants". So true! The women were amazing with their little hand brooms! They worked together in a line to sweep and then poured water out on the floor, again sweeping as a team to wash it and brush the sand and water outside. It really turned out spotless. They did a great job! 

When the medical team arrives from the States I will be cooking lunch and dinner for them daily. Ladies will be arriving and staying in the village (mud brick lodging where they can stay while they wait for an exam) at the end of next week. 

Cal and I toured the Leprosy Hospital last week. I had been kind of putting it off because I knew that it would be hard, and it was. The hospital was established 58 years ago to provide treatment for the leper patients. Now they also provide services for other ailments. Treatment for the leper patients is provided at no charge while services for everyone else is very costly for them. For a diabetic patient it is estimated that treatment for their lifetime would represent 1/3 of their income. The average income is $1 per day and the cost of treatment isn't an option for many/most. They see many diabetic patients for open sores, amputations etc. The conditions are unbelievable, yet even with horrible sores and everything else, nearly every patient tries to sit up and greet you.

They see many patients in the late stages of ailments when it is far past options for cure. A recent patient came in with near-death stages of throat cancer. In other countries they are taken to a room and told in private that nothing can be done for him. Here the man was told in a ward with many other people within earshot, all quietly consoling him as the Doctor talked to him. The doctor said he couldn't heal his condition but went on to tell him and the others about Jesus. The man said he understood and the reason he came here was because he knew they would care. Who are the people in our life that we need to remember to care about?

On a lighter note, I got locked in the bathroom in the kitchen, and it took five people and a couple hours to get me out. Good news: I'm sure I probably dropped five pounds of sweat while I was in there. We have pigeons that like to land on our tin roof and play "I'll slide down and claw my way back to the top half the night." Our electricity goes off regularly, challenging for everything electric.

The other day we went to dinner at another family's house here at the compound. Jason is a teacher at the nearby Bible school and Lenge is a nurse at the Fistula hospital who mostly teaches prevention. Simon is eleven and Isaac nearly seven. Just as we arrived the boys had some friends show up on their donkeys for some boy time. The boys had a small burner that they used to build a fire and make tea. They did it their certain way, brewing it, mixing with milk and sugar and serving it to everyone in small cups. All the while they were playing on a drum and singing. Loved it!

Hope all is well with you. We love to hear from you, (we are a very long way from home!) We love you all.

Cal and Anita

P.S. Tuesday at the bus station I saw an honest to goodness, real life Arabian knight, complete with authentic dress and sword! I couldn't take a picture. (I'm not exaggerating ... I think the sword was five feet long!)

Niger Report 2

(From Lutherhaven Office Manager Anita McCormick and her husband, Cal, in Africa for the summer.)


Danja, Niger, West Africa

June 11

Dear All,

It sure has been a week of new experiences for us!

Cal and his crew had a full week of construction on the foundation for the new house. We are amazed everyday with the amount of work completed and how it's done totally by manual labor, every part of it: if a dump truck brings gravel, it was loaded by hand with shovels!

Cal staked out the location of the house and got the strings in place for where the footings would eventually be set. After a lot of negotiation (via translators) with a local contractor for the correct materials, truck loads of sand and gravel began arriving.

Three men started making the solid concrete blocks by hand. Two of them mixed the sand, gravel and concrete with water until it was the right consistency for the blocks. The third was the master block maker who packed the mixture into the forms. He would pack-pack-pack, then dump it out and start again. The first day they made 356 blocks, the next day 250 more. Remember, the temperature is around 105-110 every day!

They have a man that comes around a couple of times a day to water the bricks so they dry right and don't get crumbly later on.

Next a crew came and dug the foundation. They used hand tools, and the reddish sand was easy to dig through. The re-bar was laid and today the concrete blocks for the foundation are being put into place by the masons. Every bit of concrete is mixed by hand and delivered by wheelbarrow. Cal's excited how well it's gone so far.

We've had two big storms since we've been here. I kind of look forward to them! They are much bigger than others I've ever experienced and we feel pretty safe as long as our tin roof doesn't fly off! We saw the lightening far off in the distance and it just kept getting closer and closer until it was  flashing one right after the other, but I didn't hear any thunder. They also have really strong winds and rain. This is the rainy season here and the farmers have planted their crops, so they need the moisture.

Cal and I rode camels the other day with a group from the compound. Fun, a little scary, but definitely fun! They had the camels kneel down so we could climb on. Of course, I nearly fell off my camel because my saddle wasn't cinched down tight and it started to slide! I just hung on and didn't fall off or scream, so I consider it a victory for me. After they tightened the saddle properly we were good to go. FYI: camels are really tall!

Hauwa, the Fistual Hospital Administrator, arrived this week and it has been good having her here. She is in charge of decision making regarding the house and can communicate with the locals to get supplies and workers here. She is also working to get the hospital up and running again in the next few weeks.

I've gone into Miradi a couple of times, to the airport and shopping. It is a city of around 250,000 and is just complete chaos: a lot of congestion with people and traffic, cars, motorcycles, and yesterday we were backing up and had to wait for camels to pass by. We bought flour from a man in a shelter made of sticks with bags of flour on the ground. There are thousands of vendors like this. We buy mangoes from women with trays on their heads who walk around and sell them. There is a different vendor for everything.

Church was again a pleasure.

Hope all is well with you, thanks for the prayers, and we would love to hear from you. We love you all.

Cal and Anita

Contact Anita & Cal at amccormick59@gmail.com 

Anita & Cal's Summer in Niger

(Anita is Lutherhaven's Office Manager. She and husband Cal are serving for ten weeks this summer at the Danja Fistula Center in Niger, West Africa, on the edge of the Sahara Desert.)


June 3, 2012

Dear All,
We are here in Danja and are so thankful for safe travels and all of your prayers.

We left Spokane on Tuesday morning, May 29, traveling via Seattle and Paris, arriving in Niamey, Niger around 4:30 PM (Pacific Time plus 8 hours) Wednesday afternoon.

We were greeted at the airport by our driver Marey and David, a local missionary who works as a SIM AIR mechanic. We settled in at the SIM Guesthouse and had dinner with a missionary family in their home around the corner. We were picked up at 7:30 AM on Thursday and flew in a small four-seater airplane to Galmi, Niger in the outback of Africa!

In Galmi we were met by Chad Windsor, a young man building a new hospital there. He showed Cal how they do construction in Africa, how to deal with the language barrier, how to get materials, and everything else he could jam into a few hours. The plan was to spend the night in Galmi, but word came that the generator was down in Danja, so Chad loaded his family and us into his truck and we were off on a road trip like no other.

It was three and a half hours of potholes, big trucks loaded to the over flowing, vehicles with goats on top, motorcycles, bikes, people walking, donkeys, camels, small children, chickens, goats, and honking and passing on either side of the vehicle. Oh also, the temperature was over 100! We made it safe and soun, and were really relieved, thankful and overjoyed, (did I say REALLY THANKFUL,) for the comfort of a newly constructed guest room!

Friday and Saturday we met other people around the Danja compound and took it a little easy to make up for a bit of jet lag. Everyone here is taking good care of us and they are an interesting group from all over the world. Sunday we walked to church with local Christian Hausa people. The sermon was preached in both the Hausa language and French. We had people with us who spoke both, so we could at least follow along in our Bible when they were reading. The music was so beautiful! Last night we went into Maradi to the SIM compound and went to a prayer meeting with missionaries from the area. It was an amazing collection of people.

Today Cal started the building project, a single home for Dr. Etengrey and his family. He had one helper, Lawalu. They can't understand each other's words, but they have nice smiles and they got a lot of work done. Tomorrow Hauwa the Fistula Hospital Administrator is arriving from Liberia. I'm excited to meet her!

Hope all is well with you, we love you all.

Cal and Anita