5Crawfords

Downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone. The stormy clouds pack a punch - on average, Freetown gets over 26-inches of rain in the month of September alone! Part II of V Thurs Sept 8: Today I went with the civil engineering team over to the far site, Connaught Hospital. Connaught is considered the top medical facility in the country. There is so much I could write today from our 4 hour visit to the site – the wastewater conditions were some of the worst I’ve seen on a trip: Raw sewage flowing out of the septic tanks right where the workers walk to hang laundry. The small amount of sewage that makes it into the designed system simply drains out into the ocean at the bottom of the site. Believe it or not, this is the road we took each day to get to the far hospital. At times we had to stop for several minutes while people cleared their stuff out of the way so we could pass through. Remarkably, it's a two-way street! But instead of telling all the stories related to that stuff, I want to shar...

Part I of V Travel days Sept 4-5: Leaving for trips is never fun for me. My past fears of leaving home come crashing down on me as the hours tick down to departure. I know the term ‘depression’ is a very real condition that plagues people so I don’t want to minimize that by using the word flippantly, but the dread I feel of having to leave Alisha and the boys sets me into a depression-like state. I know it’s irrational and not what God would have me feel, but it’s very real and a real area of growth for me to pursue. It’s far worse than the actual leaving itself, which is quite ridiculous when I think about it after the fact. Overall, the travel was fine. All the flights were fairly smooth and uneventful – exactly how I like them! We had 5 flights in all, so it was a very grueling trip. Denver to Chicago to DC to Brussels to Banjul (Capital city in The Gambia) to Freetown. Including our team, there were 31 Mercy Ships people arriving on the flight – all but one of us got our bags (a yo...