Mercy Ships talks

Staying with our family on the Africa Mercy each year enables us to keep up to date with information and photographs which we use for the Mercy Ships talks we give to groups throughout Dorset and Somerset. This year we spent a day "assisting" the Mercy Ships dental team in a temporary clinic they have established in Cotonou. There are very few dentists in Benin and when we arrived at 9am there was already a queue of over 70 people, some of whom had been there all night. The five volunteer dentists (from Norway, Australia and the UK) treated them all before the end of the day. David spent a morning watching eye surgery on the ship whilst Jenny went to an orphanage. We also visited a reception centre set up by Mercy Ships in a warehouse in the city where patients from up-country can be prepared and sleep the night before their operation and then wait for someone to take them home the night after their operation. This frees up more bed space on the ship, where there are 78 beds for patients. Finally Olly drove us 30 miles into the bush to a site where Mercy Ships is paying for and managing the construction of a residential training college for 25 agricultural students. Nearby a Mercy Ships volunteer from the Congo had already established plots of maize and beans and was teaching students pioneering ways of getting nutrients direct to the plants, rather than to the entire field.