Preparations

Dear Friends,
well, its just 24 hours until our big health camp gets started up in the village. We are actually doing examinations on each child in our village and hoping to use that data to monitor our progress in helping these children over time. This sounds simple, but it actually takes a great deal of logistical work, like making out the forms, finding the doctors, providing food, transportation, and lodging to the staff, etc. Its quite an undertaking!
Anyway, I got a great deal of help from an unexpected source today. There is a doctor at the children's hospital who I called up last night to see if he might help me make a form for examining the children. Dr. Nayeem is a big, bearded Muslim man who wears very traditional, flowing clothes, and a prayer cap. He is as orthodox as they come, and I admit that he can strike a fairly intimidating pose for a person who comes from a country at war with people in similar attire! But, Dr. Nayeem is in fact an incredibly gentle, kind man who took a great deal of time and effort to help me help these children. not only did he help me design the form, but he also helped me purchase all the necessary drugs and gave me some really solid advice. In addition, he made me lunch! So once again, my assumptions are proven wrong. This is certainly no new thing.