Our Son in Africa--Having the Time of His Life!

Our son Sam is having the time of his life working (and taking occasional excursions) with a medical team in Zambia. Every day he keeps us updated.

 

He is having the most fun he's ever had in his life, he says! (Of course, that was after a safari trip full of sightings of elephants, monkeys, hippos, and much, much more!)

The kids took to him like crazy.

 No sooner did he arrive than he made this friend in the missionary home!

He noticed that even the smallest children have to go get water at the pump. This one had to jump up and down to reach the handle.

Every day the team goes to a village, school, or other spot to set up and serve whatever medical needs come to them. 

Here is one spot.

Since the day before people had to stand in the baking sun, a tarp was gotten to offer shade, but the wind blew the grommets out! Sam helps to fasten the tarp in place. 

Maybe he was trying to be a monkey like these ones they saw at the wildlife park!   

Since Sam was just a helper and not a doctor, he did an awful lot of counting pills to distribute to people who had seen the doctors. 

He counted about 1400 in one day! 

Sometimes he took turns with the ones doing vitals. His EMT training helped with taking blood pressure, etc. He probably got more experience on this trip than he has in all his years of EMT and volunteer fireman work! 

(Did I ever tell how he saved a man's life recently outside the fire station in Colorado? The man was actually dead, no heartbeat, having suffered a cardiac arrest, and the driver next to the man had parked near the station to call 911. Sam was immediately on the scene and did what he had been trained to do. Taking turns with others, he and they revived the man, got his heart beating again! The man came to so well that he was fighting off the ones who had just saved his life!) They sent him off in a stretcher to a helicopter to fly to a hospital.) 

There in Africa, Sam helped with everything from crowd control (all he had to do was stand in the doorway and everyone behaved, but when another person came to take a turn with crowd control, people in line started getting rowdy again! :) so, too bad for him, he got to do the boring job of standing in the doorway!) to counting pills to leading devotions one morning (above). 

(Did I say I couldn't be a happier mom?)