Freetown!

Time flies!  After a delay in leaving Durban and the shipyard, 24 hours in Capetown, and lots of sailing, we arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone just over a week ago.  Since then it's been crazy busy getting everything unpacked, cleaned, tested and ready in a short time-frame for receiving patients.  We have almost 1,000 scheduled already, but we had to do another screening in Freetown itself on Monday.  Sadly, due to the vast number of desperate people (one estimate was 15,000!) there appeared to be some kind of stampede resulting in about 15 injuries and one fatality.  As you can imagine, we are all feeling shocked and saddened, but our mandate remains the same, to bring hope and healing to the world's forgotten poor.

Tonight is the hospital open house where the crew get to see the operating theatres etc, and do some fun stuff too.  Elliot is quite excited to be a pretend dental patient; it seems to involve fake blood!!!!  I (Tony) has got a lousy cold at the moment, so am staying away from lots of people.  Patricia is really looking forward to working with the day volenteers (local poeple) in the hospital; she will do a great job.

Well, there's a busy few days for me until everything is ready that I am responsible for, so we will update after that!

Please keep reading!