Dear Friends

Just before we left the UK to come here a friend said cheerfully, “You will keep up the Christ Church News Bulletin, won’t you? It usually has some excellent photos.” We had not known there was a News Bulletin, but now we do, and we’ll try our best to keep up standards.
 

We arrived here just over a month ago as the weather was cooling and Ramadan beginning. We were met at the airport by the gentle yet indefatigable Mansour.  Some of you will have met him; others may feel you have through past bulletins. He is remarkable; he would defer if described as ‘the administrator’, though he does oversee a lot of the day to day running of the centre. “Mr Fix it”, is almost too trite a title though he does fix a lot from overflowing water systems to crucial bulbs in the operating theatre. Anyway, it was he who met us, eased our way through immigration and customs (as he had done for many others before us). He has also done his utmost to ensure that we have not gone hungry, even while he has been keeping a devout and diligent month of fasting!

It was an interesting month in which to arrive. We have experienced Ramadan elsewhere, in Syria and Lebanon, but here it has seemed to be taken with a greater seriousness and consequently with greater impact on daily living. Many shops have opened very late in the morning, and briefly, but then they have opened again after sunset and kept open until the early hours. Trying to find a moment when the local post office was open proved a wearisome business. Friends have taught college courses from 9 pm till midnight. Thankfully our clinics have kept normal if slightly shorter hours than usual. One of our staff said matter-of-factly today that for her the month was “a sort of spiritual stock taking” – a nice way to describe it.
Just before we arrived, Dr John Sandford Smith, a good friend of our eye clinic, from Leicester, came to do an energetic stint of surgery both here and on the island of Socotra. Assisted by three of the Ras Morbat eye team, he carried out 94 operations in 5 days. Socotra has a population of 50,000 people. It was not the first visit of Ras Morbat staff to the island.

In a few days time we meet with staff of the UNHCR to discuss patients due for eye surgery here, from the large Somali refugee camp of Kharaz – some two hours drive west of Aden. It’s a desolate, windswept place, which we visited when we were here in May. These outside assignments are very much appreciated by those we go to, and provide valuable experience for our eye team.

Last week was the Eid, the feast, and celebrations marking the end of Ramadan. Aden has been packed with over half a million visitors - many down from the capital Sana’a, others from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states – and nearly all in enormous, highly chromed, Toyota Land cruisers. The beaches are very popular and we have never seen so many, or such bright selections of inflatable beach toys as are available here. The streets and shops have been packed too, with many children cheerfully sporting new clothes and shoes.

We have had visitors too – aid workers, Arabic language students, medics from Taiz and Sanaa. It has been good to have the Christ Church guest rooms well used and enjoyed.

As indicated already, the pace of life here this past month has hardly been frenetic, but the days have not been dull: several floods from troublesome water tanks above the office and community centre, the very sad and sudden death of a French yachtsman of a heart attack in our medical clinic where he had come “feeling bad”, a steady trickle of petitioners – Somali and local – hopefully seeking help of the new priest, a visit to Aden’s able and energetic governor to procure long term residence for our Ethiopian maintenance staff, etc … etc.

Yesterday we kept Remembrance Sunday. It was deferred, like so many things, until ‘after the Eid’. There are actually services at two separate cemeteries, one of them in Silent Valley, a hauntingly desolate place. Forty years ago, Peter’s father served a year in a now, long abandoned British Army camp nearby.

Our predecessors here, Colin and Irene, wrote on their departure, “there is something very special about Aden and its people.”

It is early days for us, but we sense that too. Over the last month we have read through a lot of the files relating to the development of Christ Church in recent years. It is the story of a labour of love and a work of faith, triumphs, set back, recovery, heartbreak, and joy. We feel privileged and daunted to be a part of that story. Rarely have we felt in such need of that heavenly wisdom, which the apostle James describes as being “pure, peace loving … full of mercy, impartial and sincere”! Discerning the way ahead now, and the appropriate priorities is a challenge. The continued recruiting and training of good medical staff will be one of them. Next month Dr Amal goes to Pakistan for two years to train as an eye surgeon, a very significant step for us all.

We are enormously grateful to all who have supported us in this new venture, and for those long standing recipients of the News Bulletin and supporters of Christ Church, who have generously ‘taken us on’.

With our love & sincere best wishes in Christ Peter & Nancy

PS. Millie, the guard dog here, who snapped and barked at us when we were here before, has become a good friend, an early caller at breakfast time, and almost a substitute for the shaggy hound we left behind.