Whew....Here we Go!!

Part of our team leaves tomorrow for Kenya. Some of you know the back story to these amazing trips, but I will give a short recap.
A physician who used to be at Vanderbilt went to med school with a physician who was living and practicing as a surgeon at Tenwek hospital in Kenya. They started dreaming about what could be done to help kids with sick hearts in Kenya. See there isn't a reliable way for them to get surgery to fix their hearts. Nairobi has a cardiac surgery program but half the time they cancel things or it is way too expensive for anyone to afford. They do a handful of cases in a year. So the dreaming continued and 4 years ago we took our first team to Tenwek. We had a bypass machine and a ton of other equipment shipped over. Our first team was small...I think around 10 people total to cover the OR, the ICU and clinic. We finished that week off doing I think 11 surgeries to help children and young adults who have congenital heart defects or valve problems resulting from Rheumatic Heart Disease and have gone every year since. The trips have continued and have grown not only outside of Vanderbilt but our patients each year are coming from further away.
This year we are expanding the trip and doing two weeks of surgery. The first week will be primarily valve related older patients and the second week will be kids with congenital heart defects. Some of our group leave tomorrow and some leave next week and some of us (that would be me) are there for the whole trip.
I am going to try and blog while there and fill you all in on the journey.
Here is our nursing team across the two weeks (minus Lisa)

You can continue to pray for safety for the team traveling, for our patients who are getting ready to be operated on...for peace for them and for our interactions with them, for our team...the first week we are a little short on staff so we will all be working extra hard, and for each person on the team and their experience.
Can't believe that we are already heading out!!
Will write again early next week once we are there after our 2 days of travel and settling in! We may do our first surgery Monday afternoon...either that or Tuesday morning.