Water Games

One of the great things about the school where the kids attend is all the extra activities that they provide for the whole community. Seeing as we are now in the middle of hot season, the student council recently held water games for the elementary students after school. They even let Elayna and Silas join in the fun along with the younger siblings of other students. We love the family atmosphere at the school and the way the kids are able to have fun with students of all ages. One of the games was bobbing for frozen tampicos in a bucket of water.


Here's Silas holding his treasured frozen tampico. This particular tampico is like an orange slushy in a bag.


The kids tested their skills at doing the limbo under a stream of water.



One of the favorite games was the slip and slide that they made on the newly planted grass on the playing field.


One of the last games was a relay race. Each team had a shirt that they soaked in a bucket of water. Then they carried the shirt to the other end where they squeezed the water into a can. Whichever team collected the most water won. The older elementary students had to wear the wet shirt as they ran. Here Silas is being helped by one of the high school girls.

We did have one injury during the water games. One of our elementary boys broke his leg in three spots while jumping on the wet grass. The Lord orchestrated everything to provide the medical help he needed. His teacher immediately did a great job of comforting and calming him while the school nurse helped. Krista called his parents to come get him. Another parent (who is a doctor) helped assess his injury. His parents came and loaded him on a board into their station wagon to take him to a local clinic for x-rays. On our way home, we stopped at our mission office and ran into one of our doctors (a Pediatrician) who had just arrived in town from Galmi hospital. We mentioned what had happened and he recommended having another doctor (a surgeon) look at the x-rays. The other doctor had just arrived in Niger from the States an hour before. He was staying at the guesthouse with his wife and a friend who is also a surgeon. I was going to be flying the three of them to Galmi the next morning so I needed to talk with them anyways to make arrangements for our flight.

We headed to the guesthouse to see them. Even though they'd been traveling for more than 24 hours, they were willing to go to the clinic to help. After dropping Krista and the kids off at our house, I drove the two surgeons to the clinic. His parents were quite relieved to see them walk into the clinic. They were supposed to arrive in Niger two weeks earlier, but their trip had to be postponed because of the volcanic eruption in Iceland. Otherwise they wouldn't have been here in town on that day. The people at the clinic graciously allowed our two surgeons to direct the care. They all agreed that the break was too complicated to treat here and that he needed to be evacuated to England for surgery. They immobilized his leg with plaster from his foot up to his waste. A few days later a medical evacuation plane came and flew him and his dad to England. They'll be in England for at least a month and will have to return to England in 9 months to have the pins removed from his leg. Pray for this family as they are separated for several more weeks. The mom is in the States now for a conference and the other kids are staying with another mission family here.