Primed and Ready

Scene ONE:  “I’m sorry, Ann, can I please ask a favor of you?”

The South Asian scholar, Bao, had become a brand new father and his wife and baby boy were set to be released from hospital. They needed help. “My academic advisor is just now assigning me extra duties and this is keeping me from getting my family back home to our apartment.”

“Sure”, Ann replied, “just give me the information and I will be there.”

Scene TWO:  A year or two passes. Our phone rings.

“Hi Ann, are you very busy this afternoon. . . my wife and baby; they are at the hospital. .” (Déjà vu was in the air).

Such calls can readily spring out of the blue for campus workers in service to international students. My wife adjusted some things and, in each instance, headed to the medical facility. A mother herself – (now grandmother) – a smile visited her face as she navigated city traffic.

Her professional training – first as LPN, afterward as Registered Nurse – had simply reinforced Ann’s natural bent. Wired for responding to people (friend or stranger) in time of need, my wife was once the focus of a family chat around our family dining table, I posed a question to our children,

“So kids, which of these five qualities would you say most hits the mark as your mother’s ‘primary love language’. . Physical touch – Quality time – Gift giving – Acts of service – Words of affirmation.

“Their response was immediate and unanimous – each of them chiming, “Acts of Service!”

In an earlier season a couple decades prior when our home rested atop a remote hill at an Africa mission station, Ann launched into action one night to speedily fashion a makeshift bandage from a set of bedsheets. A young man brought to our screened back door had been laid open at the hand of an angry, inebriated fellow tribesman. The downward swing of the attacker’s machete left a grotesque open gash. Ann’s stop-gap measure (bad pun) met with success.

“To the servant of God, every place is the right place, and every time is the right time”*

©2025 Jerry Lout                                                                  *St. Catherine of Siena

Urgent Care

Klak. Klak. Klak. Klak.

The sound of an archery bow thumping a bedroom window deep into the night is one not easily forgotten.

Our watchman’s smokey voice joined the klacking sound outside, pronouncing my surname as best he could, “Bwana Lauti, Bwana Lauti.”

At Nyamahanga’s second or third call I stirred. The bedside clock read 1:30 a.m.

“Bwana Lauti. . . Mama karibu kuzaa.”

The cement-plaster floor of our room felt cool to my bare feet. Flashlight in hand, I was soon exiting the room, “Honey, another ambulance run. A Mama has gone into labor.”

“Ok,” a sleepy voice murmured back. “Be careful.” it was a role-reversal of sorts – Ann, normally the late-night riser when a baby needed changing or fed.

A few minutes passed. I whispered a prayer as the father-to-be who had raised the alert, took his place in the passenger seat. We were off to fetch the missus, then get her to Kehancha.

Such “ambulance runs” had evolved as part of a naturally-assumed job description for any bush missionary. The assumption, we agreed, made sense, as mission personnel were among the scant number of people owning a motorized vehicle.

The race against time came pantingly close some nights over my three-plus years of free, on-call ambulance service. But I somehow outpaced the labor contractions with every midnight jaunt. The same was mostly true for Canadian friend Phil Harman of Suna Mission some distance away. Except one night. A good part of the next morning found him vigorously doing a scrub-down of floorboard and rear seat in his newly-christened VW Bug Delivery Room. Mother and newborn had fared just fine.

Over time we grew to wonder what next medical crisis could visit the compound. It was during such a period a young man appeared at our back entrance. Night had fallen. He stood bleeding profusely, leaning into the support of another man. The machete attack had found its mark.

Jesus help us.

©2017 Jerry Lout

Survival

“Sir. . Sir, Hello. . . Hello! Can you come sir? Hello. . .”

Waking a doctor from a drink-induced sleep called for persistence.

We had transported the machete-attack victim the five miles to the government clinic, only to learn an aged, slow-moving male nurse was the only person on duty.

“The doctor for this work”, he said, eyeing the wide blood mark streaking our patient’s back, “is away. You might find him at his house.”

Leaving our patient, I drove another five miles of bad road, where I came to the darkened home of the physician. “Hello. . .Hello. . .”

Thirty minutes later, the groggy doc held a kerosene lantern (electricity had not reached the village) examining the naked wound. Thankfully, Ann’s gauze-and-sheet wrap had held and not too much blood had seeped through.

The wounded man went by Mwita. He sat upright on the cot’s edge as three pair of eyes, beside the doctor’s – Mwita’s brother’s, the male nurse’s and my own – gazed at the deep slash. I had never seen such a wound.

No surgical mask was donned by any of us. There were none in supply. And, I assumed, maybe never had been.

A brief exchange between the bush-surgeon and myself left me surprised. And troubled. The nurse had stepped to another room and was now rolling in a metal cart into view. A steel pan sat and, in it were utensils. Suturing material, I guessed.

My tone was respectful, sincere.

“Sir,” (it seemed doubtful by now the man I had wakened for the upcoming procedure was a doctor in a full, professional sense) “could I ask. . . how are the instruments sterilized?”

Lifting a sizable curved needle offered by the old nurse, the gentleman held it before the lantern for a better look. With a wave of an elbow he declared knowingly, “Oh, you understand, off there in the big cities where many people live, there are, many more germs. Many more.

“But out here in the rural places, we have fewer people. And so – less problems with infection”. The man’s silence as he squinted one-eyed, finding the needle’s opening and beginning the thread, suggested my question had been sensibly answered. This is the way it is. No discussion.

I cringed at my next discovery.

“He will be given anesthetic, right?”, I ventured.

“No, we are out of it.”

Perhaps – looking back – my biggest surprise of the evening was my lack of queasiness.

Witnessing a needle in the firm grip of someone, the needle piercing the muscular surface, tugging a string of black thread in its trail – again and again – left me at the edge of nausea.

Next morning I readied myself to visit the clinic when word of the wounded man reached me via Africa’s reliable grapevine.

“You’re sure?”, I asked a second time.

“Yes, Bwana, he walked home this morning.”

My thoughts retraced the sequence.

Treks to our place last night (who knows what distance?) – losing blood the whole way. Endures several  bumpy miles of ‘ambulance ride’. Without meds to blunt the pain, the flesh of his back takes into itself a suturing needle of questionable hygiene time and again, drawing the parted muscle and sinew close. . .

I’m now feeling queasy.

And, early the following morning, walks home – more than five miles – unaided.  

While missionaries are probably not widely known for referencing Charles Darwin, I found myself at different times suddenly recalling a phrase, “survival of the fittest”.

This was such a time.

© 2017 Jerry Lout