1. The hospital is expecting a large shipment of nuch-needed supplies (including items for the pediatric department and nursery). The supplies are on their way to Nairobi but have to pass through customs. Apparently in the past, customs officials have held up shipments of supplies to Tenwek for unclear reasons. Once the supplies were held for two years! They even once tried to auction off supplies instead of shipping them here. I'm not sure why it is such an issue to have things travel safetly from the origin through Nairobi to Tenwek, but please pray that this large shipment arrives safetly and speedily without issues.
2. It is currently very dry; we have not had rain in over 1 week. The rains that we did have prior to that were very small. The dam that supplies the electricity for the hospital is running quite low and every day we have brief power outages. Please pray for rain to supply the water for the dam so that we will have adequate electricity to run the hospital as well as water for daily needs.
3. We have been seeing a lot of children with malnutrition. And we have had children die from malnutrition; it is a serious problem. This large amount of malnutrition is kind of odd since this area is very fertile and produces lots of wonderful crops. There are other factors in malnutrition besides just rain and crop availability, including number of children in the family, whether or not someone is actually caring and cooking for the children, if the father is spending the money on something else like alcohol, etc. But the farmlands are in desparate need of rain and the children need reliable food sources.
4. The pediatrics team has had at least 5-6 deaths and 3-4 hospice discharges per week since I've been here. I'm not sure if that is normal, but there are a lot of families grieving right now. It's a reminder of how urgent it is to share the gospel with people because we cannot know what is going to happen tomorrow.
Thanks for your prayers for Tenwek Hospital.
