Another very busy day today -- maybe 160 patients. But we are really clicking as a team and, IMHO, we handled it pretty well. El Bijao is a new community for us - none of us have ever been there before. It is in the middle of several coffee plantations which provides work for many of the people and is a relatively prosperous community. The school has 5 classrooms with white boards, text books and desks for all of the children. It had electricity but no running water and the outhouse was pretty rough. The children, as always, were beautiful, most of them in their white shirts and navy pants or pleated skirts which is the school uniform throughout the entire area.
Emily was sick -- desfortunadamente (that means unfortunately and we have all decided that it is the most fun Spanish word to say). Poor kid. She tried -- but 101 fever and nausea forced her back to the hotel. The municipal workers brought her back and Doris, the lovely woman that cooks for us, kept a careful eye on her. We started her on some meds and we are hopeful she´ll be able to join us tomorrow in Nuevo Jerusalen, a small, very poor community that is always our last stop of this trip.
Despite the relative prosperity of El Bijao, we were truly stumped by some of the unusual illness we say today. We are pretty certain the one child with huge parotid glands had mumps, we saw one of the worst cases of scabies we have ever seen, and a very sweet older woman with a 25 year old dog bite that sent our translator running from the room. But mostly -- we see the same kinds of things you see in the states and continue to marvel at the overall health of people who live such difficult lives.
Its always very bittersweet to see our week coming to an end. On the one hand -- the idea of a fresh salad or hot shower is pretty appealing. But to leave such wonderful people who have been so kind and welcoming to us for the week is always hard. We are all sure we will be back again so that makes good bye a lot easier.
By the way, this was the first day day where it did not rain! We´ve had pelting rain almost every afternoon! We older women actually volunteered to ride in the back of the truck to enjoy the beautiful scenery. Unfortunately, we can´t load the picture of all of us in the truck, but we will try tomorrow.
The woman to the right remarked how young she looked when we showed her her picture!
No comments:
Post a Comment