There’s Just So Much Blood

You never know what your day’s going to look like when you’re on the World Race. Rarely do my days turn out how I anticipated they would. I guess that’s just God showing me that expectations will get you in trouble. That’s atleast what Jimmy McCarty and Training Camp taught us. 😉 This particular day started off with Phil, Nikki and I going to the Cambodian/Laos border with our contacts, their kids and some Khmer friends of theirs. Later that afternoon we actually got to cross the Mekong River into Laos for a bit, without our passports. Renting the boat for an hour was only 6 USD for all 15 of us…SCORE! It was Phil’s dream to go to Laos (since his entire family’s from there) and so it was great for Nikki and I to get to be apart of his special day.

After our adventures at the border, rock climbing and hiking around the Mekong River’s waterfalls, taking a river boat ride, and sneaking into Laos via Phil’s fluent Lao and sans our passports, we thought our day was over and we would just take the 2 hour road trip back to Preah Vihear to have dinner with the rest of our team. Like I stated before, what I thought was going to happen and what actually DID happen were two very different things…as they always are.

It was Khmer New Year, and Jim and Carolin had told us that most of the Khmer people drink too much and do horribly idiotic things. I thought that meant jumping in the river with all their clothes on or coming up to us and asking us weird questions about America. Unfortunately, as it is in the United States around the holidays, everyone at the scene of this accident was completely intoxicated and this landed them in a world of pain and injury. Stopping the car, all 7 of us (Jim, Carolin, their daughter Megan, Megan’s friend, Phil, Nikki, and myself) quickly acted at the scene of the crash.

We surveyed the people in the car and their injuries. I just kept thinking, “There’s just so much blood…so, so much blood.” Two men squished on top of each other in the seat right in front of me had cuts and bruises all over their bodies. Nothing too bad, but they were still bleeding pretty heavily and we needed to put some pressure on their wounds to stop the bleeding. The older woman in the middle seat next to Nikki was bleeding from her forehead and scalp. She had gotten a chunk of skin out of both parts of her head and I was concerned she had a concussion from all the head trauma. The woman who was laying on Nikki’s lap had almost completely severed her index finger, and there was blood all over her hand from the huge gash. We needed to wrap that finger up with something, and fast. This woman also had a huge bump on her head, which lead us all to believe she must had taken a blow to her head during the accident when the tractor flipped. She was also bleeding profusely out of her nose and mouth. The fifth person was sitting in the front seat of the car with Carolin and Jim, explaining all the details of the accident to them in Khmer. This person was drunk too, so it was hard to understand him.

Jim and Carolin had a small first aid kit in their glove compartment so they took that out and handed the two cloth gauzes they had in it to the men sitting in front of me. One of the men covered his head gash with it and the other man wrapped the gauze around his neck where he was bleeding. We needed a lot more than just two tiny cloth gauzes for this situation. That’s when we started getting creative. Carolin had an extra pair of pants in the back seat that we gave that to the woman in the middle seat to put on her forehead and scalp. Carolin told her in Khmer to use both of her hands to keep pressure on the wounds to keep the bleeding down. The woman’s hair was just covered in blood. As for the woman laying on Nikki’s lap, we gave her Megan’s sarong cloth to keep under her head for support and we dumped out my cotton purse to use as a cloth for her face. We tried to clean the blood off her face as best we could, and I wrapped her severed finger with pink tissue paper…simply because that’s all we had left to use.

I realized that this is the third world’s equivalent to an ambulance and to paramedics. We are their 911 rescuers instead of trained, licensed health care professionals. It dawned on me that all of us in the car had no medical expertise, only some basic training and CPR classes. What we did have was the passion and love to get these people to safety, no matter what it took…and the Holy Spirit on our side. Phil and I laid our hands out and began to pray and pray hard. There was so much pandamonium in the car that we needed supernatural peace that only the Holy Spirit could bring. Jim was trying to drive around the endless amount of pot holes that this sketchy Cambodian dirt road had, as well as try and get a signal on his phone to call for prayer back up. Carolin was still trying to get information out of the drunk guy in the front seat with her. The two men in front of me where yelling out things I couldn’t understand in Khmer, the woman in the middle seat was saying she was having respitory problems and that it was getting hard for her to breathe. The woman on Nikki’s lap was screaming out in pain, moaning and flailing around. Nikki was trying to soothe the woman on her lap, continuously checking the woman’s pulse when the woman would go in and out of consciousness for minutes at a time. It was crazy. It was chaos. It was all a typical day on the World Race. And God had a plan for all of it.

Nikki continued to try and keep the woman on her lap conscious until we got to a “clinic” which looked like a house with people dancing outside. Everyone begged Jim to let them out there because none of them had enough money to pay for an actual hospital visit. Everyone got out at the clinic except for the woman laying on Nikki’s lap. She was too injured and needed serious medical attention in Preah Vihear’s hospital. We tried to keep the other woman with head trauma and respitory problems in the car to go to the hospital too, but to no avail…she got out of the car anyway. Another family member of the woman on Nikki’s lap (Na is her name) got in the car with us and we continued to drive back to town so we could get them to the hospital. Phil and I learned that day what it means to “pray boldly without ceasing”. Neither of us stopped praying from the time we stopped the car at the scene of the crash til the time we got to the hospital.

Once we reached the hospital, Phil and I looked at each other and said, “This looks like the scene of a horror movie. I would not want to be sick here.” The “hospital” was just a series of wooden houses with metal beds and mosquito nets in small rooms, and trash all along the outside of it. This is where we’re going to leave this woman?!!? After remembering that this is Cambodia, and that people like me as make shift “paramedics” here…I all of a sudden came to peace with the fact that these wooden houses were the hospital. We didn’t want all of us foreigners to go into the “ER wooden house” with her. That would cause even more of a circus show than the night was already turning out to be. So we decided Carolin and Nikki would be the ones to stay with Na and her family member and the rest of us would pray and go meet Joel and the other team members.

When Nikki and Carolin came back from the hospital they said that God totally used the situation in the emergency room. Nikki prayed that somehow the Gospel would be shared that evening, and PRAISE THE LORD, Carolin and Nikki ended up being able to tell Na and her family all about Jesus that night. The doctor told them Na ended up not having any head damage, PRAISE JESUS, and that she had broken her nose in the accident…causing her to bleed from her mouth and nose and go in and out of consciousness. Na’s mother began telling Nikki that she was her daughter’s savior and thanking them over and over for saving her life.

Nikki was able to share Jesus with her and said that Christ is the ultimate Savior for us all and that Jesus loved Na so much that He sent our car of missionaries to help her after the accident. After Na was stable and doing well, the mother asked if Nikki and Carolin could pray over her for a healthy recovery and safety. Upon hearing their prayers, other people in the “emergency room” began requesting that Carolin and Nikki would come pray over them and their families. God is amazing! He used a scary, bloody tractor accident to bring hope and truth to a family. Because of our adventure taking them to the hospital, the Gospel was shared and the power of prayer was used and believed in. It’s amazing to see how God uses all things (and I mean ALL THINGS) for the good of those who love him.

I can’t wait to find out what tomorrow holds. I’m not even going to try and anticipate what’s going to happen…