Our baby

I know this isn't a very good picture but sometimes you've just got to use what you have on hand when the opportunity comes to write an entry into your blog!

I'm 22 weeks and 4 days pregnant--assuming we are counting from the right day:) Dave and I really wanted to find out if our baby is a boy or a girl but so far no luck. At 20 weeks we went over to the hospital to get a sonogram with our friend and midwife Margit. Margit hasn't worked much with sonograms since in the states there are specific people who do that kind of thing. So we were hoping to have one of the doctors we know do it, but they were both in surgery. The man who works in radiology isn't in the habit of doing sonograms on babies (or so it seems) and couldn't tell us a whole lot at all. So we decided to wait and have a doctor help us later on.

A couple of weeks later we snagged our friend Abbi who is an English surgeon. When I asked her to bring us to the hospital and take a look on a Sunday afternoon (this is a Cameroonian hospital and it closes on the weekends and at night) she told me all she could do was get me the key--and didn't think she would be good for much else. But I dragged her along anyway and she looked at the screen with us while Margit moved the wand around.

When we arrived it took us a couple of minuets to figure out how to turn on the machine. Thankfully it was the same machine that Abbi uses in surgery, and although she wasn't sure, she had a few insights which resulted in it powering up (she suggested plugging it into the wall instead of the dead battery it had been plugged into). We were in a room with a raised padded counter surrounded by a bar with a flowered sheet hanging around it. I hopped on the counter and got ready. Abbi offered to find the "mangiest towel" for me to protect my skirt...thankfully I had brought my own. Dave, Ben, Abbi and Margit all crowded around me and the portable machine. We saw most of the things Margit had on her list to check, like fluid levels and major organs, the parts of the heart and brain etc. Then, Margit in all of her kindness, tried to get a view of the baby's bottom. We looked and looked and looked. I don't know how long we tried but it seemed like forever in that supper hot room. Dave and I saw something but Margit and Abbi thought it might be the umbilical cord hanging down. So in the end we had no conclusive view.

The machine is a small portable ultrasound machine and the baby looked much smaller and fuzzier than Ben looked when we saw him on the inside. All the same, I got to see his or her face and hands and feet and all the organs!:) and I got lots of time with him or her since we needed the extra time to find all the things we were looking for. I'm really grateful for the chance to see baby, and that Ben could see baby too, and if he or she is too big and scrunched up to tell his or her sex by the time we get to Michigan, I guess we will have to wait until he or she decides to come out and meet us to find out what we've got.

Check out my Slide Show!

Waza

Waza is a national wild life preserve in northern Cameroon. It is located a couple of hours south of Chad’s border with Cameroon. Our team decided to go check it out and spend some time together Monday and Tuesday of this week. We headed out on Monday morning and arrived in time to find the hotel and get ourselves signed up for dinner. When we arrived we discovered that around 20 American Embassy workers who had been evacuated from Chad because of the rebel movement in the East, had the same fun idea. So the hotel and park were full of American white people with Chadian license plates.



We purposely went out around the end of the day on Monday. We were told that the best time to go see the animals was the end of the day and the beginning. We had great luck on Monday night. We saw herds and herds of giraffes! They were incredible!



The next morning we were in the park by 6am and we did not have as much luck. But it had rained the night before which made the morning cool and the ride was pretty nice. Since the electricity had gone out we had no fans the night before and couldn’t open the windows in our bungalows, so the cool breeze was welcome. Then we got stuck in the mud! And wow were we stuck. We had 13 people in the car so some of us climbed out in order to reduce the weight in the car. After a few tries we were getting a little nervous, then the Americans came drumming across the savanna. “It’s the embassy workers!” we said. But they kept driving right past us. Margit commented, “I know they said they weren’t going to do any evacuations but this is ridiculous.” It turns out that they wanted to get to solid ground before stopping their trucks. So one of their drivers came back to us and got us out of the ditch.



From there we stayed close to their three land cruisers and didn’t get to see many animals for the rest of the morning. We did come across an iguana and some baboons and a lot of elephant tracks, but never found the elephants.



The ride was bumpy and educational. We know a lot more about off roading than we did before, and most of us had sore muscles in strange places the next couple of days!

New house

It has been a long few days here in Cameroon, at least for me it has. Last week our team mates decided it was time to move back to Chad, while Dave and I decided that we would stay here in Cameroon. There are a lot of reasons for them to go, and there are a lot of reasons for us to stay. I won’t go into the details of all these things…. But the result of this change in address for our team mates made us decide to move out of the village and to the hospital compound which makes it possible for me to see more of the team. Living in the village, taking care of Benjamin and being pregnant AND not having a car, has made it difficult for me to see the rest of the team socially. Since we are leaving on home assignment in August I felt it would be good for me to see the team more before they left for Chad. So we asked the hospital grounds coordinator if we could move into an empty house here. They weren’t able to give us a definite yes right away. We had a team get away on Monday the 16th and that morning we found out that we could probably move in on Wednesday but that depended on the situation in Chad. Isn’t that just the way? Everything always depends on the situation in Chad! I’m sure you have no idea what I’m talking about…I mean why the move depended on Chad.




Well, just after our team decided to move back in to Chad the rebels started moving into villages and towns in Eastern Chad. It is always difficult to figure out which reports are true and which are simply “hear” “say” so no one was sure if they were coming into the capital or not. Since the missionaries were so recently evacuated (February of this year) most of the people who are in the capital now would leave before the attack if the rebels tried to take it. Meskine, where we live, is only four hours from N’Djamena (Chad’s capital) and so if missionaries were to evacuate the hospital wanted to make their housing available. And that is why we could “probably” move in on Wednesday. When Wednesday morning did arrive we sat down to breakfast and I asked Dave if we had a positive go yet. He said that he couldn’t call and find out until 8, and then immediately asked me what the packing plan was. I’m sure my tone was tense and stretched when I told him that we could hardly begin packing without knowing if we were moving. So he called, and then texted the man in charge (because the phones weren’t working) and within thirty minuets we had a go. We were packed, the house was clean and we were in the new house by 3 in the afternoon. We are getting very good at relocation!


The situation in Chad has calmed and it isn’t clear if the rebels will move west toward N’Djamena or not. Our team has postponed its departure for about one week, and we are happy to spend more time with them before we go. Ben is having a great time playing with Jocelyn, the youngest McKenzie child, and I’ve already spent a couple hours just hanging out with my friends here. Dave got a call around 8 tonight from someone watching a soccer match and was able to run over to the main gathering house to watch it with some other “football” fans.

Happy Father's Day

Hey Dads, this one is for you two. we took the video several weeks ago but it hasn't been able to up load until today. sometimes the Internet is strong enough to do this, and sometimes we spend a half hour plus trying to get it to up load only to have the whole system shut down before it finishes. we are hoping for success today. happy father's day. we wish we could be there.