Ganuvie and Dr Gary

These are the Land Rovers used by Mercy Ships. They can be signed out by the staff for 4 hour increments as long as the gas is payed for and it is a registered driver.

On my first weekend here, I managed to snag a spot on one of the Land Rovers that was taking an excursion to Ganuvie (the stilt village) which is close to Cotonou as the crow flies (but an hour or so away through traffic). I actually got to sit in the front next to the driver so I had a very good view of everything along the way. As I have posted before, the traffic here is quite amazing (for lack of a better word). Our driver was a young man who had grown up in South Africa and was very comfortable driving in the traffic. Well let me tell you, it was very much the adventure. I have never been so close to certain death so many times in the course of one hour in my life. We drove on sidewalks, pulled in front of lorries, threaded our way through zimanjons (still don't think I'm spelling that right), came withing inches.....no... inches would be an overstatement....of collision after collision. But our driver never broke into a sweat, not one gesture, not one curse word, he just drove and in the end, he got us to the village safe and sound. About half way there, I just had to ask him if he had EVER driven in the US or UK. He said no, that he had never been out of Africa. I told him he would be very bored!

Once we arrived, our drivers negotiated with the "tour operators" and I use that term lightly, and we were taken on boats to the village. The village is on stilts in the middle of a lake (an African version of Venice). I've heard a few different stories of why the village was begun, but the one that makes the most sense is the one where people began building houses in the middle of the lake to get away from the slave traders. The people that lived in the village now get most of their income from fishing. They take reeds and make "fish corrals' out of them. Somehow and I'm not sure how (although our guide spoke English, it was heavily accented and being the Yank I am, I couldn't always understand him) they raise fish in the corrals and harvest them when they reach the appropriate size. It was an interesting trip although it reminded me of Myrtle Beach in that they took us to 3 different houses, but each had a souvenir shop. When we got back to the dock (which was how the locals got back and forth to the village, it must have been rush hour as we couldn't actually tie up to it and had to walk across 3 different boats to disembark.

The nurses have been having a series of talks by the doctors educating us about the surgeries they do along with special nursing care and typical complications. Dr Gary Parker is a maxfax surgeon (operates on facial tumors) who has made Mercy Ships his life's work. He originally came 22 years ago right after graduating from school and worked on the Anastasis for many years. Just to give you an idea of the conditions he has lived in these many years, up until the Africa Mercy was commissioned 2 years ago, there had never been air conditioning.....aye yi yi...I cannot imagine. He is a wonderful person, very respectful of the nurses, a wonderful manner with the patients. He told us about some of the amazing surgeries that he does. He works on the huge facial tumors that you have seen in some of the pictures. He had us sitting on the edge of our seats as he talked about removing jaws and replacing with titanium seeded with bits of bone from the patients hip. (Apparently, if you don't cover the titanium, it will eventually wear through the skin and be exposed.) He also told of huge facial tumors he removes (routinely I might add) and how he reconstructs the person's face by taking the temporalis muscle, reversing it and attaching it in such a way that it gives substance to what would have otherwise been a gaping hole. Just last week he used the temporalis muscle to fashion a new cheek for a woman who had suffered Noma as a child and had a hole in her face. He then used a graft from her thigh skin to make her a 'new face'. Awesome, stupendous surgeries.......I think that Dr Gary would be very bored in the US or UK : )