The living blood bank

On the Africa Mercy, we have quite a unique system to provide blood for patients who need blood transfusions...WE, the crew are the blood bank. The lab keeps a list of crew who have provided recent samples and are fit to donate. They cross-match the donors with patients who are identified as highly likely to need a blood transfusion the following day (there are always emergencies, but most of the transfusions can be predicted based on the type of surgery the patient will have). The donor will receive a notice on their door the night before they are needed to give blood to remind them to drink lots of fluids and be prepared to come down to donate.


Last year, I made every effort to donate blood during the Togo outreach...but, unfortunately I was never able to. The problem is that my blood type is common among Americans and not so common among Africans...so we have an abundance of donors on the ship, but not so many transfusions of that type are needed. I decided to give it a shot again this year and provide regular samples to the lab just in case it was needed. I even received a couple of notices on my door, but the patients never ended up needing transfusions....until last week.


I received another notice to drink lots of fluids and be prepared to donate, but I didn't get my hopes up this time. Then, around 10am, one of the lab techs found me and said, "Ok, come down. We need your blood!"

All the areas where they usually take people to donate were occupied, so we ended up going to the recovery room. I hopped up on a stretcher and happily held out my arm...I think I was abnormally excited about having them stick a needle in my arm, but I had been waiting for this opportunity for over a year. Needless to say, there was quite a bit of pent-up excitement now that it was finally happening :)

After giving the blood, the lab tech handed me a can of Coke and some cookies and told me I couldn't leave until I drank all of it...I willingly obeyed :) Then, with my excessively large bandage wrapped around my arm, I headed over to the OR office and met a friend there who is able to escort non-OR staff to observe the operations. He graciously agreed to let me go down and visit the OR where the patient was receiving my blood.


We walked into the OR and Dr. Gary looked up from the scalpel. He asked if I was the blood donor and then thanked me for donating. He pointed toward the suction canister to show me all the blood the man had lost. It was quite a bit.

A few days later, I met the man who had received my blood. Mohamed is 58 years old and has had a maxillary tumor growing for the last twenty years. It had become very large and painful, so he was excited when he received his patient card to have the tumor removed.

Despite Mohamed's large blood loss during surgery, he did not have any further complications and was able to make a good recovery. I had the chance to visit him in D Ward a few days after he had his surgery. I approached him and shook his hand, explaining why I had wanted to meet him. A big grin appeared on his face when he realized I was his blood donor. He shook my hand again and thanked me for helping him. It was a really special moment.

I have to say, it's so different actually meeting the person who receives your blood instead of just giving a bag of blood to be put in a refrigerator at a blood bank. It was a bit strange thinking about my blood pumping through Mohamed's heart and veins...but amazing at the same time...

With open arms

It happened when she was only four years old. Her family loved her and took good care of her, but there was an accident while she was sleeping in the kitchen and little Alberta fell into a boiling pot of cooking oil. The burns covered her back, shoulders, and parts of her arms. Her grandmother took her to a clinic in their Liberian village, but they couldn't even give her pain medicine. She laid there in pain through the night and was taken to another clinic the next day. Alberta spent the next month and a half in a clinic getting treatment for her extensive burns. Her mother wasn't able to go with her, so her grandmother Mariah stayed by her side through the whole process.

But, even after all that time in the clinic, Alberta's care was far from everything she needed. The clinic was lacking the physical therapy she needed and after a short time, her arms had contracted and she had lost her ability to lift her arms up. The kids at school began to tease her and she would come home crying. She couldn't even wrap her arms around her grandma for a big hug because they no longer reached the way they did before.

"It was too much for us," her grandma told me. "She was crying all the time and she was not happy anymore." They sought out more help and found a place to get the surgery to repair Alberta's contracture, but it would cost $1000 USD, an overwhelming amount for the average Sierra Leonean. But,  Alberta's grandmother didn't give up. She found a group of American surgeons who had come to Sierra Leone to volunteer and provide free surgeries. But since they had only come for a few weeks, they had to break the bad news "We have a surgeon who knows how to do the surgery for you, but the follow-up time is too long, so we can't do it." Mariah and Alberta had arrived at another dead end, but they didn't lose hope.

"I knew that if God had saved her that night from dying, then he could help us," Mariah reminisced. So, she continued to pray and hope. It had been over a year since the accident and Alberta was still struggling with the ridicule and teasing of others, but her grandmother held onto her faith in the God who sees everything and loves us more than we will ever understand.

A few months later, Mariah was volunteering as a soccer coach with LACES, an organization in West Africa that uses soccer as a therapeutic method to help children who have been affected by civil war. An American girl named Laura came out for a special event going on with the LACES group and noticed Alberta and her scars. She began asking questions and asked Mariah if it she could take photos of her granddaughter. "My friends told me not to let her take pictures," Mariah recalls. They thought Americans just wanted pictures of children like Alberta so they could use them to make money. "But, I didn't mind her taking pictures, so I said it was fine."

Laura was able to send the pictures to a friend who she thought would be able to help.  In God's providential plan and timing, it turned out that he had previously worked with Mercy Ships and was back on the ship for a visit when she contacted him. He was able to show the pictures to the doctors and not long after, Alberta was on the surgery schedule.

Less than a month later, Alberta and Mariah packed up their stuff and set off for the journey of a lifetime to Sierra Leone. After a fourteen hour car ride to Freetown, Alberta and her Grandma arrived at our "Hope Center," where they would stay until Alberta had surgery.

Alberta pre-operatively on the ship

Three months have passed now since Alberta had her surgery. It has been a long process with a lot of therapies, dressing changes, and even some pain. But, not a day has gone by that I have not seen a smile on that little girl's face.

Alberta in her splint after surgery



There have been many, many dressing changes to her graft and donor sites. But, she is our little all-star. It still amazes me that she sings songs, reads books, and occasionally falls asleep during her dressing changes (some of the other kids still scream!)...One day, we finished reading "Green Eggs and Ham" (which is now her favorite book thanks to her favorite storyteller Beyonce :) and she got down from her dressing change saying "Thank you, thank you Sam I am" to Todd, one of our wound care nurses. It warmed my heart and brought a smile to my face.

While Alberta's wound healing has been slow and her hospital stay has been one of the longest out of our last group of plastics patients, she is finally on the verge of finishing her treatment! Her arms and shoulders are all healed up and she can finally move her arms in all directions. Every time she stretches out those little arms to wrap them around me with a big hug, I can't help but smile and thank God for bringing Alberta to us. He had a plan for her all along and I know He still has amazing things in store for her life!