A full day at the infirmary

Hey everyone,

So today I got the opportunity to go to the infirmary for the whole day. If you've been reading the blog regularly you may already know what the infirmary is but let me explain it anyway. The infirmary is a home that houses around 200 patients that have various physical or mental ailments that make it difficult to care for them. People can be sent there as early as their 18th birthday although most people there are elderly. The only thing everyone has in common at the infirmary is they were dropped off their by someone who was able to "prove" that the individual has no one to take care of them. Many of them don't have any family, others have family that can't support them, and a few actually have family that COULD support them but have convinced someone that they cannot. Once people are sent there they almost never leave-- except in the rare case that an obscure family member pops up saying they would like to care for them. The people there that are mentally sound know that they will be at the infirmary until they die.

The conditions at the infirmary are pretty bad, but it would be difficult to explain in detail without actually experiencing it for yourself. It smells bad, the people and facilities are constantly dirty, the nurses are not always the most compassionate of people etc. To be honest, at the beginning of the summer the infirmary was the one part about coming to Jamaica that still made me nervous. We take each group there Wednesday afternoon for about an hour and the first two weeks of the summer I would get a knot in my stomache on the way there.

This summer Tayler (one of my awesome fellow summer staffers) is taking smaller groups from the teams to the infirmary for full days. As the summer has gone on I've become more and more comfortable at the infirmary to the point where Wednesday afternoons are one of the highlights of my week. It was hard to find a day when I didn't have any personal responsibilities but today worked out perfectly for me to go with Tayler and the kids from the team.

I spent the whole morning hanging out with my friends Raphael Richards and Geraldine Thompson. We just sat and talked about life for a few hours. I asked them more about their pasts and I asked them to share some words of wisdom with me (which were quite powerful). Then I played dominoes with Raphael, which is like the national game of Jamaica. I visited with another friend of mine, James Reed, and he also blew me away with some of his words of wisdom. He told me about the importance of serving God while you are young and he narrated the stories of Samuel and Joseph for me. There was something kinda cool about hearing the stories as he narrated them in that situation rather than sitting at home and reading them for the umpteemth time and notting getting a whole lot out of them.

God continues to reveal himself in amazing ways to me at the infirmary. I know it's gonna be really difficult to say goodbye to my friends there which is something that I never would have expected at the beginning of the summer.

Thanks to all for the love and support!

AdamE