I finally had the opportunity to go on my first outreach jigger clinic with Sole Hope. I was very excited to see what exactly went down at one of these. The best thing about it being my first time, is that I got to share the opportunity with my sister! Yup, my sister has joined me on African soil for about 3 weeks. I could not be more happy and blessed to be able to share these experiences with her! - We have a lot of exciting things in the coming days, but I'll post about that later :) - So back to the jigger clinic. We set out for the Sole Hope Outreach house around 9:30. On top of the regular scheduled staff, there was another family who was volunteering for the day. We all crammed into 2 vehicles and hit the road. We went to a village about 20mins away, still in the Jinja district. We arrived and there were people of all ages surrounding us. We set up the cleaning area, removal area, and the shoe giving area. Maddie and I, and our friend Johnson took foot notes, while Amber helped transport kids from the cleaning area to the removal area. We sat behind the jigger removers and had to record where each jigger was taken out. Each person had a sheet with their name on it and it had a picture of two feet and two hands. We had to put a dot for each jigger, in the end we would count them all up and record any other notes if needed.
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| Maddie taking footnotes for Duncan |
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| Me taking footnotes for Lillian and Peter |
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| Johnson taking footnotes and talking with little man [whom Johnson named Robert VandenBerg :)] |
The man who I was taking footnotes for in the picture above (far left, in the brown) is 18 years old. On this day he had 237 jiggers removed from his feet, hands and his left elbow. 237! That is a lot of jiggers to get removed in only a couple hours. Lillian did a great job removing. He was one of the worst cases in a community based clinic. They have had some cases at the outreach home that have had more than 400 jiggers. When a case becomes any worse than the man on this day, they bring them back to the Outreach home to live and monitor as they remove and let the wounds heal. This man will be staying in the village, but Sole Hope plans to check up on him this week and they also plan to spray his home for jiggers. He has had a constant battle with jiggers for a while now. If you were to look at his feet you can see scars from previous jiggers. We pray that with a spray of his home and an education on how to protect himself, he can become jigger free.
I am so thankful to have such an awesome God lead organization right down the road from us. It was an honor being a part of the organization for a day. If you want to learn more about jiggers and what Sole Hope does, click on the link below. It will take you straight to Sole Hope's website. Happy learning!
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