Tweens & Twenties, plus a few older ones!

Time to celebreate the summer months. The kids have had a lot of fun this summer doing many things. They have gone several times tubing down the river, there has been hikes to various places, caves explored, waterfalls seen, movies watched and a whole bunch of neat things going on. Our station kids and kids of volunteers have all taken part in these events. Last night was our turn to host a summer event for the kids. It was for school age and college age young people with three people from the older generation tossed in. We also had some medical volunteers take part and that was nice also. We had a bonfire outside where we roasted weiners and later had S'Mores and we had an Air Hockey tournament that was a lot of fun. We randomly chose people from a hat to pair everyone up and we ended up with eight parings in our brackets. We had a winners bracket and a losers bracket with the winner from each of these 2 brackets playing for the championship. Jordan, husband of our school teacher and maintenance man, was

the winner's bracket respresentative and Jeff was the loser's bracket representative. They played for the championship and it was a rematch of an earlier game that sent Jeff to the loser's bracket. Jeff had Jordan against the ropes with a lead of 9 to 7 but Jordan held on and came back to take the game beating Jeff 10 to 9. It was a great game and hard fought but Jordan is the Air Hockey Champion of this night. Maybe Jeff will beat him next time.

Top picture: Nancy Pyle, wife of volunteer surgeon, standing & Rachel Thompson, High School Teacher.

Bottom picture: Jeff taking on Maggie, PNG doctor in the rural medicine training tract, rotating through.

New Life!

Are these little girls cute or what?! Their names are Naomi Yuani (with her Dad) and Rose Andrew. They are both 4 years old and have heart defects.

Naomi has two holes in the septum that divides the right side of the heart from the left. One hole is at the level of the atria (the upper chambers) and the other is at the level of the ventricles (the lower chambers).

Rose has a Patent Ductus Arteriosus. When a baby is in mom's belly the baby isn't breathing in order to get oxygen. Instead the oxygen is coming from mom's blood supply. Because of this not all the baby's blood needs to go to the lungs and so there is a little "by-pass" called the ductus arteriosus that shunts blood directly into the aorta. Once the baby is born and takes those first breaths everything changes! Baby is now using those little lungs to get oxygen and all the blood needs to get to the lungs. That "by-pass" road normally closes shortly after baby is born. Rose's did not. She has a Patent, or open, Ductus Arteriosus.

A third child, Able Isaac, (not pictured) has a heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot. This defect is a little more complicated. As the name eludes to, it has four components to it.

All three of these children are now in Pt. Moresby for heart surgery! Once a year an Australian team of heart surgeons come to PNG. They stay for 10 days or so and perform heart surgery for free. There is a screening process held across the country to determine which of the children who have heart defects are good surgical candidates. Five of the Nazarene Hospital patients referred for the initial screening made the list for the final screening which took place early this week. Three of those five were referred on; Rose, Naomi and Able.

Please pray for them, their families, their surgeons and the rest of the heart team that will be caring for these little ones! Without this special gift of surgery, these kids would develop heart failure at a young age.

Thank you, God, for providing new life for Rose, Naomi and Able!!