Mykolaiv clinics

We are several days past our clinics in the Mykolaiv area.  We stayed in the town itself.  Before the war, there were about 400,000 people in the immediate area of Mykolaiv but the number dropped to around 250,999 with the fighting nearby.  It has recovered somewhat and may be up to 300,000 now with all the amenities you would expect in a city that size.  Lot’s of restaurants and very good ones.  Ubiquitous Pizza Hut fast food places, theaters, parks and broad boulevards with a well functioning public transit system.  Well, those and a number of bombed out buildings and poignant memorials with individual pictures of soldiers who have been killed in battle with flowers.  It was a good place from which to base.

Mykolaiv is outside of the range of conventional weapons outside of drones and missiles.  The clinics however were much closer to the Russian lines at the Dnipro River (we avoid the spelling Dnepr which is the Russian spelling) and were well inside the range of Russian tube artillery.  The villages were relatively safe though, since pulling their artillery that close to the front would expose the Russian artillery to Ukrainian fire. 

These villages (and clinics) were without electricity, heat or running water.  Water was drawn from wells, light was provided by flashlights or rare solar lights and heat by wood stoves.  This brought the spectrum of disease to what I would see on developing world mission trip.  All the physical ills were overlaid by the ongoing stress from drones and memories of the land fighting and occupation that they went through.  We could handle a lot of the care with the medicines that we brought, but much of the good that we did was the simple fact that we were there, listening and providing health care.  They hadn’t seen any physicians in these villages since the war began 2 & 11/2 years ago.

Thanks for being part of this mission and please pray for the people of the Ukraine.