Hey, friends! I wanted to let you know about my fall dates. No, unfortunately, not dates with handsome, eligible men who love Jesus. The other kind of dates — the calendar kind. I have the privilege of partnering with Compassion International for a Fall 2015/Spring 2016 speaking tour. I’ll be speaking at more than a dozen colleges and universities, trying to inspire college students to invest their lives in making the world a better place, making the Lord’s Prayer a... Read more
Felix lives less than two miles from the Compassion center. We climb into the director’s car. I’m sitting in the front passenger seat, and Felix is in the back seat with Ben, the videographer. As we’re driving out of the parking lot, I ask Felix if we can take a selfie. “Okay, say cheese!” He laughs and grins. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile, and it warms my heart. (more…) Read more
On my last weekend in Togo, I visited a Compassion International site in Lome, the capitol city. I’ve been a spokesperson with Compassion for the past year, a non-profit whose mission is to “release children from poverty in the name of Jesus.” They go into the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest developing countries and partner with a local church to create a community center for kids. Compassion gives money to the church, who employs local staff to run the... Read more
I imagined it at least a hundred times. When I was sick with malaria, when I was exhausted after a 28 hour shift, when the hospital ran out of water, when I lost a patient I’d tried so hard to save, I closed my eyes and imagined coming home. Stepping on the plane in Togo, falling asleep with headphones and a blanket, waking up on U.S. soil, hugging family for the first time in four months. In spite of how unlikely it... Read more
It’s my last day in Africa. I’m staying at a little motel right on the ocean in Lome, Togo’s capitol city. This morning I’m drinking coffee on the patio outside my room, looking at the waves, thinking about my time here. It’s been a hard three months. The work was hard, the hours were long, the weather was hot. Plus, it was a hard season for me personally — physically, emotionally, spiritually. And getting a bad case of malaria... Read more
Last week, the doctor who was on-call admitted a 5-month-old little girl. The fever, the positive malaria test, and the seizures all pointed to what is, in Togo, a common diagnosis: cerebral malaria. The little girl seemed to have a bad case of it. She seized all through the night, in spite of multiple doses of anti-seizure medication. The doctor added antibiotics to cover her for bacterial meningitis, which is also (unfortunately) a common diagnosis. The following morning, when my... Read more
Thanks for praying, sending good thoughts, doing a rain dance….or….whatever else you did over the weekend. We now have running water in town and here at the hospital compound. From now on, whenever I take a shower or flush a toilet or turn on a spigot, I will whisper a prayer of supplication for the millions of people around the globe who live without a clean, readily-available water supply…and a prayer of gratitude for the simple blessings in my life... Read more
We’re out of water. It’s one of the driest “rainy” seasons on record in West Africa, so there wasn’t much water to begin with. Then, a few days ago, the pump that pumps water from the Oti river into the town’s water treatment center broke, so they shut off all running water. The only option was for townspeople to draw water from wells scattered across town — which are contaminated with parasites and bacteria. The hospital compound had a 3-day supply of... Read more
Yesterday was my first day back at work, post-malaria. When I got malaria, I was in the hospital for three days, and then I spent a week after that lying in bed, sleeping, reading, taking short walks, drinking lots of water, and trying to keep my mind off the nausea and joint pain that just.won’t.go away. (I lost 6 pounds in 10 days, if that tells you anything about how lousy I felt.) I showed up at the hospital yesterday to... Read more
While I was in the hospital receiving treatment for malaria, the nurses told me the story of what happened Friday night after I passed out. They said four nurses had put me onto a golf cart and driven me to the hospital. Someone wheeled a gurney outside, they lifted me onto the gurney, and then rolled me down the hallway to the room where the doctor and other nurses were waiting for me. I don’t remember much of anything until Saturday... Read more
Sarah Thebarge
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In