Week 13

This week has been a pretty chill week after the hectic week of clinic we just came off of. This has been pretty much a preparing week for the next mecical campaign down the river. I worked 3 days with the manual labor guys hauling wood out of the jungle again. It was actually pretty nice to get back to this sort of work. I was pretty tired dealing with so many patients every day. I was definitely ready to back to some manual labor with the guys.

Julie has been helping the other nurses prepare the pharmacy for the upcoming clinic. I think she made cotton balls and gauze or something like that. She also made packages for mini surgeries that the doctor will do in the upcoming clinic. Neither of us had hard work this week. It was very relaxing and the perfect way to spend the week before we start another clinic.

This week is also Semana Santa, also known as Easter. We had nightly meetings for the kids at Santa Elvita. Once again, I had to give the opening sermon for the series. The topic was about forgiveness and how Jesus could still forgive those who were persectuing him while on the cross. The kids attention span isn't the greatest, so you have to go over the points pretty quickly. I think the kids are becoming better listeners though. I hope they get a little bit out of our messages, but I'll never know until heaven. It's been fun being able to preach, but I'm definitely not a future David Asscherick or anything. I don't get nervous at public speaking, and my spanish is comfortable enough where I don't need to prepare that much anymore, so all those things help me to be able to give an effective sermon (I hope).

Anyways, we leave for Inahuaya tomorrow. The boat ride takes about 20 hours, so that should be interesting. Once we're there, the group will split into to 2 groups: one bigger, more stationary unit, and a smaller more mobil unit. I chose to be on the smaller travel team and Julie decided to stay with the big group. There are supposed to be a lot of adventures this upcoming week and I'm really excited to be able to get out there and do something different. Hopefully it will be an amazing way to end my stay here as a student missionary.

Weeks 11 & 12

Sorry we haven't written in a while, things have been crazy around here recently. Let's see...we had a group from Ozark Academy come down for their spring break. The poor kids were a little bit shocked to find out that they would be taking bucket showers and using an outhouse, but they got used to it after the first few days. When they first arrived we heard nothing but complaining. I asked one of the girls how she liked Peru and she said, "It's nice. Except I don't like the bugs. Or the heat. Or the humidity. And I don't like taking bucket showers or working in the field." Welcome to Peru, haha.

Before the high schoolers arrived we decided to play a little prank on them. Our cook, Jose is from the Dominican Republic originally but grew up in New York and goes to Southern. He decided to pretend not to speak any English. Whenever the kids wanted to say something to Jose we would have to translate for them. They all had to help him out with the cooking and it was hilarious hearing them try and communicate with him. They literally knew zero spanish. Jose said to one of the girls, "Cual es tu nombre?" and she looked at him blankly and said "I don't speak spanish." Then Jose was like "Tu nombre. Mi nombre es Jose. Cual es tu nombre?" and she still had no idea. I don't know what they're teaching those kids in Arkansas, but Spanish certainly is not in the curriculum. Each day Jose would speak some English to one of the kids to see if they would notice but they never caught on. He talked to one of them in English for a full 2 minutes at one point and then switched back to Spanish without him noticing. Finally after about 3 days Jose announced at dinner time, "I speak English perfectly." The kids just looked at him and said, "Who taught him how to say that?" It took a while for them to actually believe that he spoke English and a lot of them were mad that we had tricked them. But it was a lot of fun for us and it gave me good practice with translating.

After the Ozark kids left, we had a week-long medical/dental clinic at kilometer 8. A group from Eastern Virginia Medical School came down to help us out. A group of them were working on getting their MPH and as part of the program they had to get experience with community mapping. So during the day a group would go out into the community and do a survey, finding out where people get their water from, how many kids they have, etc. Not sure what they are going to do with the information once they get back to the States, but they seemed to think that the information was pretty important. There were 4 medical students, 3rd-year resident, and a doctor that came with the group as well. Since we had so much extra help we were able to see 1066 patients in 6 days. It was a mad house! People would start lining up outside the church where we were having the clinic at 4 am. At 6:30 we started registration. I got stuck doing registration this clinic. Not a fun job at all, especially when you have to turn people away who have been waiting in line for hours.

Once registration was over, I helped out with getting the heights and weights of all the kids under 6 and the blood pressure of adults over 20. Then I worked in the pharmacy filling prescriptions and giving shots and talking to the patients about each of the medicines. It's exhausting, but really good practice. Then around 12:30 I had to start afternoon registration and do everything all over again. It was pretty much non-stop from 6:30 am to 6:00 pm every day. Craziness! I got to help the doctor out with removing a growth on this girls ear and with a circumcision. I don't think that urology will be a field I'm interested in. Sorry, dad!

Brett was on the dental team and they had their hands full as well. They saw almost 230 patients and between Brett and this other guy named Colt, they pulled almost 190 teeth! The other two guys on the dental team did fillings. Brett's last patient of the week turned out to be a nightmare. He numbed her all up and started pulling and her jaw came out of socket. Once Brett realized this he stopped and it popped back into place. He didn't want to continue and was going to send her home, but the doctor wanted to pull it out for some reason. So he had one of the guys hold this poor womans jaw out of socket while he pulled the tooth out. While he was pulling, the woman actually fainted. I don't know if it was from pain or what, but she was out cold. So we had to give her an IV shot for pain and then she just lay there for about an hour while we packed everything up. Then we drove her home and dropped her off with a bag full of Tylenol. Needless to say, I definitely will not be having any dental work done while in Peru.

Anyway, things are pretty much wrapping up here. We have one more clinic and then we leave to travel around for about 10 days before heading back to the good ole US of A. Hope everything is well at home. Thanks for reading!