An Interesting visit to Southern Ethiopia.

One is interested in tribal customs. Some seem excellent, some queer, but these days we are discouraged from questioning things as everybody is considered to their opinions being as legitimate as anyone else’s. Unlike these days, in my time there were very few doctors to cover the increasing population and many of the doctors tended to stay in the bigger cities with more facilities and more money! The population were mainly rural.

The mission with which I had a close association ran several nurse clinics which were very useful but obviously limited in their capabilities. One such clinic was near the Kenyan border where the tribe had a, to us, different custom. Before a young man was permitted to get married he had, as shown in the picture, to run back and forth, naked, over 20 cattle tied transversely. By their custom boys were not circumcised as babies (the Orthodox, Muslims and some other groups are circumcised near birth or as puberty approaches). As uncircumcised penises in adulthood, unless erect, are a bit dangly and lengthy, it was their custom to be circumcised around this time. The technique was to hold the foreskin slightly stretched out over a rock and cut it off with a swift sword swipe. Not every sword wielder was accurate with some disadvantageous results.

The tribal elders came to the lady nurse who was in charge of the clinic and asked if she could arrange for someone (eventually me) to train a young Ethiopian male dresser who worked with her to perform circumcisions. It was agreed that I would come down for a couple of days and perform 40 such procedures. Interestingly there was in the area an American Army squad vaccinating goats and their young doctor asked if he could join the process and be also taught. (The dresser was the more capable student!) Very little had been prepared and I guess it was my fault as I had expected an American nurse to realize what was necessary if I wasn’t to only use a sharpened sword! So the first evening was used making sheets to be sterilized, hunting up syringes and local anaesthetics, suture material and enough tools to do the job professionally. The next morning I met the line up, had them bathe themselves and set about with a couple of demonstrations, self performed on them, teaching them to use local anaesthetics, making sure how much you wanted to remove etc. I then guided the two trainees through the process. We did the forty finishing late in the afternoon. We stopped for a lunch of ‘Injerra b wot’. When the local anaesthetic wore off I bet there were some unhappy chappies but at least still with all the necessary bits there!

There is a very different side to that trip at that time which I might tell at some other time.

Dominic Cartier

What makes a majority ‘right’?

Not often but sometimes I enter into articles on Facebook. And (you may not agree with me) I am basically on the Israeli side of the Gaza-Israeli troubles. You will note that I do not say Palestinian-Israeli war because I can’t get a clear understanding as to where or what Palestine is. “The term Palestine is also used to refer to a geographical region in the West Asia, comprising of modern-day Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza” is a quote which I think is tied into the British Mandate Proclamation in July 1922. Although many attempts have been made to subdivide ‘Palestine’ into portions for the Arabs who previously lived in the area and for the Jews who also previously lived in the area none have been successful. It is common and I think undoubted knowledge that it was in a large way meant to be a home for the many displaced Jews and this became the home of many more Jews particularly after WWII. The Arabs who basically live in this area are of Egyptian origin and what is now called Israel is open to mainly religious Jews but also Arabs (mainly Muslims) and Christians from many countries. To again quote what I find on Wikipedia ‘While most Israelis are Jewish, a growing share (currently about one-in-five adults) belong to other groups. Most non-Jewish residents of Israel are ethnically Arab and identify, religiously, as Muslims, Christians or Druze.’ (8 Mar 2016). Of course Judaism stretches from atheist to ultra-orthodox Judaism and so is a racial rather than a religious title.

It is obvious, and I think an indisputable truth, that antisemitism is rife throughout the world. Many nations (including most of the variously quoted 49-57 Muslim nations) are anti Israel. Many nations which claim to be friends of Israel have large populations of Muslims and sympathizers with the Arab Gazan people. This has been obvious in the anti-Israel often called pro-Palestinian demonstrations in many countries. Our own Prime Minister in spite of being careful about what he says these days doesn’t come out clearly on the Israeli’s side and his government has financed the terrorist (thus labelled officially in Australia) Hamas controlled Arab side of the struggle.

Which leads me to my question at the beginning – ‘What makes a majority right?’ I can remember a man now dead but very wise who taught us in a lunchtime, Government approved, Christian group in our school that ‘One man and God makes up a majority – and it doesn’t need the man.’

I am not claiming that this applies to my stand for Israel but I certainly don’t accept that the majority are correct in expecting Israel to allow the terrorist Hamas/Iran group, with a entrenched policy to exterminate not Israelis alone but all Jews. One of many quotes which are easily found and checked reads ‘On August 20, 2012, in a sermon broadcast on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV, Hamas official Sheik Ahmad Bahr prayed, “Oh Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count them one by one, and kill them all, without leaving a single one.”’. In addition the founding documents of the group are clear in what they say!

I have been called many things for taking my pro Israeli stance – but the one which I hate the most is ‘you are a nazi’! And this is in spite of my saying that if I were younger and could get permission to work in a hospital through which terrorists couldn’t be involved, I would choose to be in Gaza helping to treat the suffering, which I believe is largely caused by the terrorists who want the Israelis to get a bad name!

Around the table!

It seems like centuries ago but I can still remember the seven of us sitting around the table and chatting, discussing, arguing – whatever took our fancy. The boys were all into soccer, I played cricket and even one year I coached the U15 soccer team when our oldest boy was in the team. My son persuaded me to do so as they didn’t have a coach. They had lost the first two matches and as he said were ‘unorganized’. Several kids didn’t like my disciplined approach and left, but we didn’t lose a match and won the grand final 8-1. One of the boys ended up in the Australian team! But I’ve become sidetracked so back to the main story. At our table we talked about many medical things which might have made some visitors squirmish. I had returned from Ethiopia because of health, and could not return at that time because of the Communist take over. However, we had lived in the hospital grounds. There was a large leprosarium so the kids grew up seeing the deformities caused by that disease. Our first son was a bad sleeper so that with my wife’s third and fourth pregnancies he would come into the theatre, if I was operating in the evening (pretty often) so that mum and number two and eventually number three child could get a decent sleep. Aged four he learnt how to squeeze the anaesthetic bag if patients were paralysed. I had to give my own anaesthetics and a worker would manage the anaesthetic when the patient was asleep. They enjoyed teaching the little white kid how to do certain tasks. The kids used to do Sunday rounds with me in the hospital after church. So they knew the sights and screams and smells of medicine!

I remember one day, when my wife was away looking after a sick parent, the kids asking me at the breakfast table what I was operating on that day. They knew the ending ‘ectomy’ but when I said an ‘oesophagectomy’ one of the younger boys asked ‘what is an oesophagus?’ It’s what joins your mouth to your stomach’, I replied. ‘So how does the food get down then?’ was the next question. ‘I pull the stomach up and sew it to the end of the throat’ I replied. It is a bit more difficult than that and takes a few hours but I didn’t go into detail. Number four’s answer has always tickled my fancy. ‘Now there is a man who can truly say “I’m full up to here!”‘ indicating his Adam’s apple area (at 5 his Adam’s apple wasn’t developed – but you know what I mean.

Dominic Cartier

Can a non-scholar be a Christian?

I was, and greatly enjoyed being, a surgeon! Shortly after obtaining my higher degree in surgery I joined a Christian Mission to go to Ethiopia as a missionary surgeon in one of their hospitals. I was expected to and very willingly underwent an assessment of my beliefs as a Christian. Obviously and logically the mission had standards and desired a certain degree of theological unity among its members. Having satisfied them that I was okay and could be accepted as a member I went to Ethiopia, where I worked up to 80 hours a week as the only surgeon covering a population of more than a million, but I also had a vital relationship with the ‘spiritual’ side of mission life. Later on after the communist takeover was overturned I was in government hospitals on their Academic staff.

In one area that I worked in the early 2000’s the population was very largely Muslim. But there was a University with a student body of about 40,000. This student body was made up from candidates accepted from all over the country. A significant percentage of these students were ‘Protestant’ Christians. The Protestant Kale Hiwot church was small in the University town but was the central organizational base for the churches which were scattered over that region of the country which made up one of 13 regions in the whole country. The church eldership was basically made up of mature Christians who had some but not a great theological nor secular education. They were great people but the younger University students were much greater in number. An average attendance at the church which the University students attended would have been nearly a thousand. That was great but the young people kept referring to and using Paul’s phrase ‘we are not under law but under grace’ (Romans 6 v 14) to underpin the thought that, as they were no longer under law, they could act as they wanted and God would turn a blind eye. This sounds, and was, wrong. The kids were basically good kids but some of their actions were not acceptable by the elders! Well the problem was magnified because the majority of the University students, whether they were Protestant or Orthodox or Islamic, in the freedom of their situation and of modern thinking seemed to live on the same basis. The student population came from all over the country and lived in University housing without parental advice or control!

There were 500 recorded terminations among students by an American subsidised clinic in the last 6 months that I was there. There were a number of other places willing to perform abortions whose activity I have not included. Drugs were a problem. I remember an instance where I had to operate late at night on a senior member of our University staff who, when drinking and ‘drugging’ with a younger member of his own unit, was severely stabbed in his abdomen which caused a critical situation. Neither of them were members of the Protestant church to which I referred earlier but both claimed to be Orthodox Christians. So the problem of lack of morals was society wide!

The morals of our Western countries aren’t any better! It is not a theological issue in most people’s eyes. There is a broad sense of personal rights to freedom and consequently a loss of moral standards.

So how does that take me back to the Pauline teaching that ‘we are not under law but under grace’? In the context of his whole book of Romans, where he writes this phrase, Paul has said in the early part that all mankind is guilty under the law as sinners alienated to God. BUT the Grace of God in Jesus and the Easter Event gives us the opportunity to be forgiven! And that in a sense is the core of the Christian message, now God has given us the opportunity to be forgiven by His Grace and not be judged by our law breaking. There is, however, more to the law than the law relating to Justice.

In the Jewish religion the law had different aspects – sacrificial, dietary, health and moral for example. When we think about it, we also think of the law in different ways. Jesus said that He had not come to destroy the law. Most certainly he didn’t come to destroy the moral law. We have a good summary of God’s moral requirements in the ten commandments! (Exodus ch 20). Christianity is not legalism in that we have to obey certain rules to earn our way in God’s acceptance, but it is certainly a call to a high understanding of what God has laid down as moral. I find that so releasing. Most see the commandments as negative and they do have a prohibitive aspect but equally they are there to be a guide and encouragement to a wonderfully rich and peaceful life.

To follow on….from Kids beware!

From the PAST – How many presumably intelligent politicians couldn’t see that the vote on same sex marriages was not primarily about the right for people to be married (they already lived together and had many legal protections!). One would have expected ‘Shepherds’ to look deeply and thoroughly! There is a good reason in law why people are requested to ‘tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ The government certainly did not apply this standard to themselves in informing the public about why they wanted the same-sex marriage passed. Rather, on a broader scale of ‘perverted ideas’, there were powerful elements in both government, educational facilities and percentage wise smaller groups in society who passionately wanted to make it possible to bring into the educational system and society an acceptance at all levels of the ‘normalcy’ of homosexuality. There were and are many who consider this as legally allowing the tainting of normal healthy minds at an age when they are most impressionable and unable to discern truth from pressure! And this is planned to begin even from infancy? How long did it take between the law passing and pushes to change educational standards in primary schools. Anecdotal reports claim that the route in had already been planned! Most certainly they had begun pre-plebiscite to teach it in Universities!

From the PRESENT – In what war has the attacking army been supposed to feed and protect the enemy who have committed filthy actions to bring war upon themselves? What is called the ‘Fourth Geneva Convention’ has many excellent provisions to protect civilian normal life when their country is being attacked; – noting particularly medical, educational and daily living (shopping etc) facilities. Very clearly this Convention puts onto the shoulders of the attacked people to not use these facilities to cover and/or protect war time actions! So although it sounds good in theory, actually the ‘so called Government of Gaza’ negates all these reasons as they place warheads under the cover of every such institution which the IDF has entered! Many proofs have been clearly shown to the whole world – the majority of whom prefer to believe the proven Gazan (Hamas) lie.

From HISTORY – The now anglicized word ‘Palestine’ has a history. It was a region of Egypt where its people were Egyptians. It was a Roman term introduced after the 70 AD massacre of many Jews as a substitute name for Israel, Judea and Samaria – the population were almost 100% Jews; and an area of the Ottoman (Muslim) Empire called by the British and verified by the World Nations at the end of WWII as the Palestine Protectorate as a home for the Jews! Politically (and remember the Law is often an ass!) they said that it was to be separately governed as a homeland for the Jews and the Arabs, both of which groups lived there! They were not officially called Palestinians. Since then the Arab portion of the population have refused to see the 2 state division unless it included annihilation of all Jews. (intifada)

UNIMAGINABLE – How many honest nations leaders can vote for a country which has a terrorist government to become a member of the UN? The honest answer is none! In the recent UN vote the applicant Palestine had refused on several occasions to accept a land for themselves. Offers have been made several times by Israel before and refused unless, accepting that land, meant the eradication and genocide of its enemy, Israel? Australia showed its lack of honesty and integrity by voting ‘YES’. Shame upon all our heads. Of course you could deny the label ‘terrorist’, but I can’t imagine much more terrorizing things than they have done!

Dominic Cartier