Hello everyone …
Well we met everyone on the team in Newark before our plane left for Mumbai. As always it was interesting and just a teeny bit akward to meet people you have never met before on your way to a once-in-a-lifetime journey that you will all share together. Still, we have all shared a little bit about ourselves and we know before we begin that this is no ordinary team….
As we share, and ask questions of each other, I can only admire the 11 other individuals who have set out on this journey together with me. Individual after individual, we start to share one on one, and in small groups, the past journeys we have been on, and why each on of us chose to go on this particular medical outreach.
I hear from team member after team member who has been to multiple places all over the world. One has been to Africa twice, India one, another lived in India for a year and will be moving to Cambodia within a week after we return home to work there with an anti-trafficking non-profit. Australia, Nepal. Nicaragua, Thailand, Haiti, you name it someone has been there. As we also share our reasons to be on this trip I am thinking to myself, wow, this team is not only a group of incredibly seasoned travelers, but they are individuals who have had their collective hearts broken by the tragedy of sex slavery.
We have an amazing 15 hour flight to Mumbai, and wonder how it is going to go when we try to bring several hundred pounds of medicine and equipment through customs. They immediately flag our entire group one by one as our gear is scanned and we are placed in a separate holding area. I can see that they are asking Mike (our team leader) many questions, and finally there are phone calls being made. One of the guards comes over to Colette and I and asks where we are going, and what we are doing. I tell him we are a medical team going to work in Kamathipura. “The red light district?” he asks. Colette and I nod yes. He walks away and starts talking to a few of the other guards (as I remember there were at least 7). He wanders back over to us and says that he feels this is a good work that we are doing. He mingles with a few more of the other guards and appears to be telling them about our plans. Some sort of unknown phone conversations are also going on. Suddenly we all get to pass through without having any of our baggage checked. We know that we are receiving favor!
We are happy to just get to our hotel and sleep. The first impressions of Mumbai at midnight for me are that it doesn’t seem quite as chaotic as I thought it was going to be.
The next morning up for breakfast, devotional, and off to the clinic to set up. We make the short trip from the YMCA to the Bombay Teen Challenge medical clinic in Kamathipura. Although I was a little surprised to find this clinic space to be quite small and rather modest, we were also very pleasantly surprised to see our “medical clinic”. It is a large temporary structure put together with rope and sticks, lined with red fabric, with fans in every room. This structure taking up a good bit of the street surrounded by absolute poverty. There is an odor, and nearly every corner and every space is taken up by a human being sleeping under a tarp, or perhaps in a cubbyhole, in run down buildings with concrete rooms no bigger than about 6 feet by 6 feet. And there there are the stray dogs, the goats, and …. the rats. Yep, rats feeding on anything they can find in the trash on the streets. Thankfully they are rather afraid of people, so the minute you move they disappear. The truth is that there are no words to describe what we are seeing, no pictures that can show the crazy, chaotic, and unbelievable sight before our eyes.
Our “medical clinic” actually consists of 5 single rooms under tent and two more two-room offices. We set up our ‘radiology department’ on one end of the tent structure (with ultrasound!), and the pharmacy on the other end. We have 3 examining rooms in the middle, and then the 2 room offices are set up with an OB/GYN and a dental clinic. We set up “triage” on a table outside the tent entrance where 2 team members will be posted with an automatic blood pressure machine (battery operated). We are set up in no-time. Dr. Mike starts calling our clinic ‘Mayo-Clinic Mumbai’, and it sort of feels that way when you contrast it to our surroundings! Our medical team consists of a radiologist, someone with a doctorate in pharmacy, a dentist, emergency medicine physician, family doctor, 3 physician assistants, a nurse, an electrician, and Colette who is there to shoot some of her amazing photography magic, pray, and help in any way she can. Three of the members of our team are New Yorkers, the rest scattered throughout the country (and England). We have a wonderful young female physicians assistant on our team who is a Jewish girl from New York! We wonder what posessed her to choose to take this kind of a trip with a group of sold-out Christians! Brave young lady …. : – )
We will share more tomorrow. Just suffice it to say that after 3 days of clinc and hundreds of patients, the Lord has been there through it all. It’s hard to believe that it has only been 3 days! This group that started out strangers have already become a tightly knit team who has shared more tears and more prayers than we can count.
Today we found out that the Supreme Court in India is going to hand down a decision on a 60 year-old conflict between the Hindu and Muslim people of India Thursday afternoon at 3:30 p.m. I believe that that would roughly be 5:30 am in the USA. It is a religious battle regarding a Muslim temple that was built on a sacred location for the Hindu people. The police and military are telling everyone to remain calm in spite of what the decision is, and they say they will be out in force tomorrow in keys spots all over the country. We are closing our clinic tomorrow at noon as a precaution, and we will spend the afternoon together in what we pray is a safe place, awaiting the reaction of the people. Yes there has been civil unrest in the past in India when this type of thing has occured. No, nobody knows what will go on, and we have made the choice to be reasonably cautious, without over-reacting. Please pray for this amazing team as we move forward.
Tonight Mike called this “The Dream Team”. After only 3 days with this incredible group of individuals I would have to agree.
