2008-12-20

Dear Tina,

I am still in PPC because our flight out of Manila was delayed and it looks like we will be stuck here until Monday so that I can have funds transfered into my bank account.

The incident of which I spoke previously, involved Bubun who lives just next door. He had been sick for two months but his family had not bothered to bring him to the clinic. They only decided to bring him when he was almost dead. I couldn't even recognized him he was so skinny. At any rate he had a host of problems among them resistant malaria. they tried everything and nothing seemed to work. Well as a last resort they went to Larium.  Well from this point you can probably guess the outcome. Good old Larium, the stuff that any US doctor will recommend above anything else. Well, as you can guess, Bubun went stark-raving crazy.  We got a call from the SMs telling us we needed to get up to the clinic really quickly because Bubun had gone crazy and was throwing everything off the porch and out of the clinic.  Well we slipped and slid our way through the mud up to the clinic and sure enough everything was strewn all over the yard.  A bunch of people were standing around to watch the spectacle but nobody was doing a thing.  I guess Brian was scared spitless.  Bubun had thrown the helicopter doors off the porch and then proceeded to throw empty propane tanks on top of them, busting up the plexiglass and in general causing hundreds if not thousands of dollars of damage.  Well as I walking up Bubin was busily starting to get undressed. I was climbing up on the porch as his pants and everything else hit the floor. So I just walked over to him, told him that it would be a good idea if he kept his clothes on, pulled up his pants, took him by the arm and walked him back into his room and sat him down on his bed.  He was so weak he really could not do very much resisting. But just talking to him in a normal tone of voice seemed to calm him down. Any way I sat there a couple hours while they got things figured out and lined up folks to keep an eye on him during the night.

Any way, after a couple days he had come out of his Larium high enough so that we thought he could go home, which is not far away. Wow what a relief.  We thought the fun was over, but no not yet.

The next day Dwayne and I flew over to Kensuli and worked on Sundays new house. We were pretty jazzed we had a day free of rain and we were finally getting the roof on. After days of working only two or three hours and then the rain coming again it was going to be nice to get the job behind us.  Well with the cool weather we were really making good progress and then we got a call on the radio.  Ma reported that Bubun had gone crazy gotten a hold of a bolo (machete) and was chasing his kids and wife around trying to kill them or do some other bodily harm.  Leonda asked me for where I keep the handcuffs and whether she should go over and subdue him. Well that was awfully valiant of her, but I told her it made more sense for Rinal and some of the other big guys to go over and get him tied up and remove his weapons.  Well the swat team came but were too scared to do anything so we were asked to drop our tools and fly on over and help solve the problem.  So it seemed it would be a good idea to do something. On the way to the helicopter Dwayne suggested that we just fly over and first hover next to Bubun's house and while he was distracted the others could tackle him.  It seemed like a good idea but there were a bunch of coconut trees around the house and it was pretty rough country where only a high hover would do but we radioed the folks the idea and flew on over. We dropped down into a hover as we approached the house the jungle below was going wild with the down wash of the rotor blades and we began to creep closer but could see no one.  Obviously the previous activity had encouraged all inhabitants to make a quick exit. Well it was a good try and we were about ready to fly on to the landingan and go see what we could do first hand when Dwayne suddenly said, “there he is.”  Sure enough he was standing in the shadows and at that moment another individual was tackling him from behind with someone following.  Well we decided the job was finished and flew on back and resumed our work.  Later we found that as soon as they had tackled and cuffed him he was wondering what he had done to deserve such treatment. When they told him he had tried to kill his family, he said that he had no recollection of doing anything like that.

Anyway, we never got the roof finished.  We were needing to leave for the low lands and could not leave Bubun in Kamantian in that condition. So Dwayne flew me to Bing, I picked up the truck and met Leonda out at the Dam and then after tying up Bubun securely in the stretcher on the side of the helicopter they flew him and his wife out to the lowlands to be taken to the hospital.

Anyway, we are hoping that the side effects of good-old, dependable Larium will, in the process of time, wear off.  Fortunately, Bubun seems to be coming back to his senses a bit faster than one of our former student missionaries who went crazy on Larium, tried to kill himself, and then took months to recover.

Anyway, we finally got Bubun in the hospital, although we had to deal with a new doctor who didn't know his right hand from his left or appendicitis from a UTI (I am not kidding) and arrived safely at home in the lowlands at 9:00 pm.

Anyway, just another run-of-the-mill day in Kamantian. Wish you could be here to help.