CWARM, a broken arm, and Grandpa’s visit

Grandpa and David relaxing by the pool at Club du Lak T. Sunday evening.


As I now have written well over 40 entries into this blog, I have found myself worrying about whether or not these stories can possibly continue to be interesting. Even though we are living in an unusual place, we do have fairly regular routines, and I was worried that this might begin to get a bit tedious to read.

Fortunately, with Oren, there is an assured amount of unpredictability which should keep this blog interesting indefinitely. This week he managed to break his arm. I have jokingly said to others recently that Oren breaking bones was always a matter of ‘when’, not ‘if’ as far as I was concerned, but it was still quite traumatic for me as a parent at the time it happened.

As I wrote last week, we have been in Kigali for MCC regional meetings. The group is called C-Warm (Central and West Africa Regional Meetings). We hosted MCC reps from Chad, Nigeria, Burkina Fasso, and Congo, as well as the area directors currently based in Pennsylvania. We had daily sessions to discuss MCC’s policies and organizational health, as well as challenges we face in our regions. We also had an opportunity to do some field trips in Rwanda to show our visitors around. Kigali and Rwanda in general are really nice places to visit, and the temperature was quite cool (in the 60 at night and 70s by day).

Oren’s accident happened on Tuesday, the second full days of meetings. Fortunately we were doing our conferences in a large upper room in the guest house itself. Oren and some other kids were playing outside in the lawn and driveway, overseen by two young Rwandese child care workers. With Timmy and another young boy there, I knew Oren would be playing rambunctiously, and I was not particularly alarmed to hear him cry out during play, and probably need a bit of attention for a bruise or bump.

The cry came about 4 pm. I decided to go out and get him so the meeting could continue uninterrupted. When I went down, Oren was being brought into the house by the babysitters. He was crying and I took him up in his room to watch a video while we finished the meeting. I asked the babysitters what had happened and they described a game where Oren was running down the hill and crashing into the gate (like a runaway train). He had hit hard and begun to cry. He was in our room for about 10 minutes and I went to check on him. He said, very surprisingly, “Daddy, I’m hurt very bad.” I was going to pick him up, but when I touched his left arm he yelped in pain, and something did not feel right. Oren had a long sleeve shirt on, and I was worried about what I thought I felt when I touched it. I immediately, and gently, removed his shirt to see what I had feared--a marked deformation in his left forearm. The bone was obviously broken (not coming through the skin though.)

I picked him up quickly, ran into the meeting and said to Rebecca that I had to go to the hospital immediately. She stayed with David and Zachee and I went to King Faisal Hospital in Kigali. Cindy the proprietor of the guesthouse, assured us that good health care was available in Kigali.

Zachee drove while I kept Oren awake, fearing he would go into shock. When we got to the ER, it was basically empty, and we got right into a room. The nurse gave Oren a shot of some analgesic that really drugged him, splinted his arm and sent him to X-ray. The X-ray was the only part of the procedure that seemed a bit crude by western standards, but fortunately he only got one.

When we looked at the film, it was obvious the radius was broken. We then had a fairly long wait for an orthopedist, who was not at the hospital, but when he did come, he gave Oren’s arm some gentle traction and put on a plaster cast. (fortunately surgery was not necessary to reset it.) He told me it should heal completely normally, and he could have the cast off in 3 weeks.

The total time in the ER was about 4 hours. We left at 4 and got back around 8. The group had gone to have dinner at a pizza parlor and we all got back to the guesthouse about the same time. Oren was generally very brave through it all. He did cry some, but not very much. He was also very patient in the hospital. It has been interesting watching him get used to having a cast. He seems to like to tell people that he broke his arm too.

Despite the fact that the last 3 trips to Kigali have all involved trips to the doctor for various reasons, I am glad that Oren was not in Bujumbura when it broke, I am not sure how good the facilities are here.

Unfortunately it has been hard to reign him in, and remind him that he cannot jump off ledges, swim, play in the sand, or run around recklessly. He has already fallen down about 4 times despite my attempts to protect him. He is also very disappointed that he cannot hold his paper when he colors and usually asks someone to sit next to him and hold his paper when he works.

The rest of C-Warm went well. One of the highlights was a day when we went up-country to visit one of our partners. Friends Peace House has a Femmes en dialogue group who do some shared income generating activities. These included, cultivating beans, brewing a kind of traditional banana ‘juice’ (beer), raising goats, and Portobello mushroom growing. The unique thing about the group is that it is comprised of women who were survivors of the 1994 genocide, working side by side with women whose husbands are in prison for acts of genocide. The project has been successful in bringing these women together, as well as giving them a means of livelihood. Most are widows (or defacto widows with husbands in prison.)

We had a chance to talk with the women as part of our field trip and they shared some moving testimony about the affect of working in such a group.

The place where we went for the field trip, Musanze was also about 2 hours north of Kigali and close to the park where the lowland gorillas live. There is a spectacular range of volcanoes there that were just coming out of the clouds by the time we were leaving. It was some breathtaking country none the less.

By Friday, and after at least two 4am trips to the airports to get reps and their families on planes back home, we were very happy to see this conference come to an end. We were not looking forward to the challenging task of getting 3 boys (Timmy, Oren, David) along with Zachee and us, up by 5:30 on Sat. so we could get back to Bujumbura before 1 pm. The reason for the rush back was to meet my father!! Dad had been teaching for several weeks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and decided to take a flight south to see us. (There was a direct connection.) He was arriving after 1pm, but we were six hours away in Kigali, with the unpredictable Rwanda/Burundi border between us. With considerable effort we did manage to leave early on Saturday and raced down to Bujumbura. We took the newer route but did encounter a lot of truckers at the border which slowed our crossing down somewhat.

Long story short, we pulled into Bujumbura just after noon and dropped off Zachee and Timmy at their house. After unpacking ourselves we headed to the airport. When we got there we found the plane was late, but no one in the airport on a Saturday has any information about its ETA. So we had no idea how late it would be.

Instead of waiting with 2 kids and Rebecca. I dropped them off at Oren’s school where there was a school program celebrating spring. We had not planned to be back in time for it, but we now were. Oren did create some interesting stir among his classmates showing up with a broken arm. They were happy he was back after missing a week of school though. (Fortunately we had practiced Oren’s class song with him all week.) I went back to the airport to get my dad, and by the time I got back to the airport he was waiting on the curb. I got him and we rushed back to school just on time to see Oren sing with his class!

I have to say, it is really amazing to see him begin to find a community of his own in school. He really went from hating it to loving it, and sang loudly (in French) in the front row.

“Quel temps fait-il, Monsieur le temps? Dois-je rester dedans? Quel temps fait-il, Monsieur le temps? Moi, j’aimerais sortir!”

He still cannot speak French although it is pretty hilarious watching him try to talk to Timmy. He basically speaks English in a kind of slurry way, and thinks that is French. (Timmy has no idea what he is saying but Oren usually accompanies it with furious gestures as well-- usually orders like ‘Get down, from there’ or ‘Give me my train.’) But Oren is definitely learning to understand more.

It is also apparent that Oren’s new favorite activity is coloring, and he does it with considerable skill now. I would not have thought a 3 year old could color so carefully, but apparently the ‘Belgian’ coercive method has really worked on him. (Actually it is an activity consistent with his own predisposition toward order, focus, and a touch of obsessiveness.)

It has been great to have Dad here, and he did pack a large stash of chocolate chips and jelly beans from Grandma, which thrilled Oren. We took dad to church today, and then did a little sight seeing. First a stop at the “Musee Vivante” a good example of a third world zoo. There were a lot of interesting dangerous creatures of Burundi, including mambas, cobras, crocodiles, and even a leopard from Congo. But there is not much concern for safety and the keeper happily opened cages to let us take pictures, or agitated the snakes to make them attack. Still we had fun. There are also some examples of traditional Burundian housing. (This is the place where I wrote that they offer to let you buy a guinea pig to feed to the reptile of your choice.)

After that we went to Club du Lak Tanganyika for dinner. (The night before we took him out to Indian.)

I was also able to set up several lectures in a leadership conference for my father to give. We will be doing that this week, and it should be very interesting. I will let you know more about that next week.

I am going to stop, here lots of other things to say, but there was just too much this week.