Gidan Bege and Blindtown

Hello! Here’s another fun and exciting experience we’ve been able to have here in Nigeria. It’s called Gidan Bege clinic! Gidan Bege, if you remember, is the ministry which took us to the village outreach. Dr. Cindy Anthis, one of the missionary doctors, runs a free clinic mostly for women and children at Gidan Bege every Wednesday. Marion, Becca, and I have been taking turns going there, sometimes all three of us, sometimes only two of us. It consists of us, Dr. Anthis, a Nigerian medical student, and anywhere from 3-6 health care workers all crammed in a small room, all on two long benches, seeing anywhere from what feels like 50-150 patients in about two hours. It’s loud all the time. We do the best physical exams we can in this setting, but often, you just have to rely on the history of the illness and treat whatever the top three diagnoses might be. We end up being very liberal with handing out medications, because you never know if they’re going to come back, and you want to make sure you cover for the most dangerous illnesses that they might have. We see a lot of cough, fever, rash, eye problems, hypertension, diarrhea, malnutrition, etc. Dr. Anthis is pretty amazing and for the sicker ones, who really need hospital care but can’t afford it, she often pays for their care.
Gidan Bege is a pretty amazing place---we get a chance to talk with the boys (formerly living on the streets) who live there, and visit the jewelry shop, sewing shops, prostheses shop, etc---people, many widows and ex-homeless people, are trained to do these things to support themselves and I am incredibly impressed at their successes.
Then we go to Blind Town, which is quite an experience. This is a section that the government put aside for people who are blind, and it is very, very poor. Many of them can’t travel to see a doctor, being without money or sight. Mostly Muslims live here. Apparently, Muslims inflicted by bad diseases are often turned out of their homes to beg, because one of the pillars of Islam is to give alms to the poor, so those with bad diseases are made to beg as a way to support this important pillar. At least, this is what I am told. Apparently the Christians take care of their own, so there are few here. It is frightfully dirty, crowded, dusty, and smelly. There are animals everywhere. It is a warren of alleys with tiny hovels, one against the other. We went down each alley way, and people crowded everywhere around us. Though Dr. Anthis and Gidan Bege have been coming for a while, apparently they never lose their fascination with bature (white people). All the kids wanted to touch the bature and grabbed Marion, Becca, and I all over. Multiple kids grabbed our hands at the same time and it’s hard to get them to let go. Dr Anthis is an amazing teacher and is good about letting us do things. She lets us do BP’s, exams, etc. Anything that needs to be done, it’s done, right there on the streets. I’ve never done such down and dirty medicine before. Two of the health care workers hauled around a big medicine bag and we handed them out as we could. We saw similar things to Gidan Bege, such as astronomical hypertension, worms, infections of all sorts, coughs, heart failure, and just complications from many chronic diseases that we hardly see in the US because we control it before it damages our bodies. Dr. Anthis also spent time trying to convince women to do family planning. Muslim men often have many wives and don’t believe in birth control. One lady we saw needed to have birth control, she had heart failure from pregnancy and almost died with the last one but her husband refuses to let her. He’d rather see her die than try to help her not have another baby, which is hard for us to understand, yet, Dr. Anthis is just patient and is slowly trying to win the husband over. She has more grace than I do!
All in all, Blindtown was a great experience but overwhelming. It’s hard to explain how suffocating it can be to have thirty kids circling you at any given time, clutching you. It’s hard to explain how frustrating it is to see the suffering, the poverty, around every corner. It feels like there is no end to the people who need help, that we could give out medications and see people till we dropped and still, there would be more people that needed help. It makes you feel quite down, sometimes. At the same time, if we didn’t come, there wouldn’t have any help. They wouldn’t have anyone to care for them, no one to share the love of Christ with them. And something is better than nothing. Sometimes, you just want to run away from the ugliness of it all, but I’m trying to remind myself that it was for this very reason God brought us to Africa. He wants us to give love in places where there is little love, and He wants me to be in a place where I’m not totally comfortable, so I can stretch myself and learn to rely on Him completely.