Belated blog

Sorry for not posting a blog for almost 3 weeks!! We are still here and Caleb is now fine. We never did find out what was wrong with him, but he is now fully recovered. Maybe it was swine flu! I was pleased to find out that we now have supplies of tamiflu in Dodoma if we ever need it! I only know of one person here with it and she has now recovered. To be honest swine flu has the same symptoms as malaria, so I am not sure how much it will be noticed.

My sister has been staying with us for two weeks, which was lovely and allowed me to get on with a lot of work. Last weekend we went to Dar to take her back to the airport. Daniel and the children went to the cinema to watch 'Ice Age 3'. Bethany said to Daniel, "have you ever been to the cinema before, daddy? I had the opportunity to go shopping with my sister and drink a cappuccino, however I found that my shopping stamina has gone. I am not used to shopping trips now and I found that with all the choice and products available I quickly got tired and found it very difficult to know what I really needed. It's strange because in Dodoma I always feel very rich, because I am relatively well dressed when compared to a lot of other people and I know where my next meal is coming from. However when I go to Dar I always feel that my clothes and hair are very scruffy and actually I have no money at all. It's a strange world here.

My house lady Sarah has been quite ill the last few weeks. I am still not sure what was wrong with her. She had typhoid and then one Sunday morning she rang me to ask if I could take her to hospital because she was really sick. She went to hospital and then went home and seemed to be recovering, but then whilst we were in Dar she went back into hospital completely unconscious. She is out again now but I still don't really know what the problem is. They seem to treat people here but not really diagnose. I went to visit her in the general hospital, not an experience I like to repeat too often. Really the NHS is amazing. At least there you don't have two people in a bed!!!

This week and next we have a team here from the UK doing various projects linked with MAF. I have organised the trip, so am running around making sure it all runs smoothly. I have handed back my job to Kate, who has now finished her maternity leave. After the team has gone I will need to look for a new job, although there is a lot more to do in the house with Sarah off sick. Caleb will join Joshua and Bethany on the 7:20am bus into school, so I will have quite a few free hours each day. This is the last week of the holidays and this week the children have been to a bible club every morning run by another team from the UK. I told Joshua to watch Caleb as he seemed so small to leave by himself. Joshua reported back, "mummy it was all under control, I think maybe you worry about us too much". How well he knows me!!

Trusting God (or not)

It's remarkable how easy it is to trust God when you don't need to. This has been brought home to me again this week, as we found ourselves again in a situation where we had no choice.

Caleb started throwing up on Tuesday morning, and carried on (every 10 to 30 minutes) all day and night and into Wednesday morning and afternoon. For want of any other options, we took him up to DCMC (Dodoma Christian Medical Centre) - the best of the clinics/hospitals in Dodoma. It is new built and well equipped, but has been having staffing difficulties so only has one, relatively inexperienced, Tanzanian doctor. We were concerned about dehydration and needed to check it wasn't malaria - although he didn't have fever. He was very sick though.

They injected him with an anti-emetic, and then tried to put him on a drip for rehydration. Unfortunately, being a Simkins, he has no veins, so this was something of a fruitless exercise! They then tried to encourage him to drink oral rehydration fluids (1 litre!) If you've never tried this it is the kind of stuff that makes you feel sick even when you're not, so trying to give it to a nauseous 4 year old is (as you can imagine) another fruitless exercise.

With not much else in the way of options, we took him back home. The anti-emetic worked (in the sense that it stopped him vomiting), but unfortunately it made him feel continually like he was going to be sick - which made getting him to drink anything even harder!

Which brings us to trust. We had no alternatives to trusting God at this point, with the knowledge that even with a medical evacuation it would take 4 hours to get him to any kind of emergency care. Unfortunately we find that being obliged to trust God is not a comfortable experience! It might be easier if we knew that no children of Christian parents ever died in the mission field of tropical diseases. But unfortunately, that isn't the case. :( So we can't actually trust God that he will be OK, we can only trust God that he knows what's best (and hope and cross our fingers that God thinks the Caleb being OK is what's best!)

He is much improved now, up and about and pickly as usual - but he is still not eating properly, and has thrown up a couple of times today. So your prayers would be valued, and who knows - maybe God can be persuaded :) Please pray for faith and endurance for us as well - this on top of the stresses we are already facing is not making life particularly enjoyable at the moment. As my friend said this week "This is just not how you expect 'ministry' to be before you come out. What happened to 'the joy of the Lord'?" It's a good question - and one I am still struggling with finding an answer to. All I can say is, the longer I'm a Christian, the less I understand how it works :)

[This is a rare Daniel post, in case you didn't spot it!]

some new photos