I seriously wonder what the chances are of this happening this past weekend... I was walking in this huge market in downtown Cotonou, when I saw this kid pass by me in a purple t-shirt. He turned around and smiled at me and I about died laughing when I saw he had on a Lone Oak High School Football t-shirt. Of course, I thought.... could it be another Lone Oak other than my alma mater??.... but the back of the shirt had the football schedule for 2007 on the back with every Paducah and surrounding area team listed on it! SEE...... your Salvation Army donations do make it here!


Wow- its been a while since I've actually updated this. The weeks are really flying by. It is crazy to me to think that I'm more than halfway through by time here. The above picture is of me with a patient who had an severe electrical burn that resulted in losting both arms. Several memebers of our team are working on trying to get him a prosthesis through an organization in the states.
The orthopedic program is going well- we only have two more weeks of surgery, then my partner and I will be seeing the post-operative patients in the clinic for the next few months. We have been learning a technique called Ponseti that is a series of cast changes that are designed to turn a club foot into a normal foot. A club foot occurs in 1 in 1000 births and is bilateral (occurs in both feet) more than 50 % of the time. It can be caused by a genetic defect or growth arrests at 9 weeks of gestation. Casting should be done before one year of age to be successful without significant surgery. We have learned alot from 4 different pediatric surgeons who have come through here and have gotten pretty good at it! Here is a picture of what club feet in a small child looks like....

If there is no intervention, the child will appear to walk on their ankles, balancing on the sides of the feet and developing thick callouses. They will be unable to walk quickly and playing sports would be nearly impossible for most.

Older child with unfixed club feet

This is a picture of a little boy named Prince who has had 4 castings from us so far and is scheduled to have a small surgery to lengthen the tendon on the back of his leg next week which will hopefully normalize his foot.

Here is a picture of Prince after his cast got removed... we see the same sad face from many of the kids when we take one cast off and have to reposition the foot. Luckily, with the Ponseti kids, we use plaster, so we are able to soak the casts off. When we use fiberglass on some of the slightly older kids who have osteotomies, we have to use a cast saw to cut it off. Despite the fact that the cast saw doesn't have a rotating blade, but rather a strong vibration, the sounds alone scares the kids to death. When they see us coming at them with this horribly loud device they've never seen before, many of them kick, scream, and some even bite. Yes... I got bit last week by a cute little 4 year old girl. She wasn't so cute after she bit me.... luckily, she was negative for HIV and hepatitis....

On April 30, the Dutchies on the ship celebrated Queens Day, which is a national holiday in Holland. The day is the queen's birthday and is celebrated in Amsterdam with a big party, everyone wearing orange, as this symbolizes national and royal pride from the royal family name- The Family Nassau, House of Orange. The Dutchies here threw a big party with a bake sale consisting of Dutch pies, cakes, cookies, and waffles. We played all kinds of games... all of them focused on who could do strange random tasks the fastest.....

This game consisted of putting all this stuff on, along with flippers, walking about 50 feet with it all on, then taking it off and immediately....
bobbing for apples
I won!!!
This game required you to put on an orange suit as fast as possible, run about 30 feet, sit in a chair and say something like "The queen is the greatest" and then run back and....

Try to get a nail into a bottle , which is hanging from a string between your legs (that is attached to the suit)
Blindfolded dutch treat grabbing
This one timed who could hang on a pair of jeans the longest. This one required each team to walk a 50 foot distance on this giant wooden board by coordinating all of our steps, turning and going back the fastest. It was hilarious!

The people of Benin and Africa in general, it seems, are big Obama fans. This storekeeper asked if we were American and said "Oh come see, Obama is here!!" He was very proud of his cardboard Obama....