An early look at "Selection Day" . . .

Ali Chandra (that nurse made famous by Sixty Minutes!) posted this on her blog today.  I like it because it gives a bit of info on what will be taking place over the next 48 hours or so in Pointe Noire, Congo with the Africa Mercy crew.  

  

This is the card I'll bring with me on Wednesday when I climb into a Land Rover sometime before six in the morning, heading for the school where the main Selection Day of the Field Service will take place. (Point of order: we used to call it Screening Day until we realized that we were being met by blank stares from many of our French-speaking partners. It turns out that selection is much easier to translate and makes much more sense to the people we're serving in this part of the world. It'll take a while before I stop calling it Screening Day, but I'm all for people actually knowing what we're doing.)



On Wednesday, my card will serve to keep track of me, to give our security team a quick way to know who's on site during a day when the vast majority of the ship's crew will find themselves on the sandy ground there at one point or another.

But I'm not the only one who gets one. I know they don't look like much, but these cards are the same ones we'll use when we write down the information about our new patients, when we decide on a date for surgery or further screening and hand them the promise of a new life, carefully printed on a label stuck to a little rectangle of yellow plastic.

I'm holding mine right now; it feels like nothing, and yet on Wednesday these cards will carry all the tremendous weight of hope and fear and longing. There will be hundreds, maybe thousands of hands reaching for them, and we have been tasked with deciding whose fingers will close around one and whose will go home empty. It's an enormous responsibility, one that none of us takes lightly, and I'm feeling all the usual emotions as I prepare for the day, anticipation and apprehension fighting for the upper hand just like they always do.

During our briefing this morning, Kirstie, the Ward Supervisor, reminded us of the truth of the thing, no matter how overwhelming the need might seem. We're not called to save the world on Wednesday. We're called to be faithful to the ones God has placed in front of us.

I can't wait to see who's in that line. I can't wait to shake their hands and look into their eyes and listen to their stories. Most of all, I can't wait to send them through to see the surgeons, where, hope against hope, they'll be handed a yellow card of their very own.

And I know you don't have a card, but we need you there, too. We need you storming the gates of heaven on our behalf as we make what are, quite literally, life and death decisions. The first patients will probably start lining up sometime tomorrow; we will have nurses and security staff on site all night to pre-screen patients in the line and keep order, so please pray for safety and protection. We can't do it alone.