Maine Eye Team arrived!!

Great news to share from this week... Yesterday brought us the safe arrival of the 24-person team from Maine, and today they started up their (huge and impressive!) clinic and began operating on some cataract patients. We are thrilled to have them here, providing a service that is so desperately needed in this area! Today we stayed home from our usual clinic in Canilla on Saturday (Sorry to leave you on your own there, Leslie!) to play host/-ess and to do what we could to help the team get started here. Little did we know how self-sufficient and resourceful they were, though! They hardly needed our help, and did a wonderful job of getting things up and running this morning...

They are already seeing record numbers of cataract patients, and have full surgery schedules for today, tomorrow, and Monday already! They are also helping lots and LOTS of people with eyeglasses, sunglasses, and other eye health needs. I hope they are enjoying their time here as much as we and the people of the area are enjoying having them here.

Our post for today is short, because we are not as directly involved with patient care during the eye surgeries (An OB/Gyn is, as it turns out, pretty useless when it comes to anything that far up on the body!) I did manage to upload a few pictures to tie you guys over until we have better stories to share, though...

The first two pics are from clinic today... one inside and one outside, showing the large numbers of people waiting to be seen. I'm not sure how much detail you can make out on these photos, but the set-up inside the large multi-purpose room is basically a separate station for each stage of the process of evaluating/examining, testing, treating, and otherwise triaging or pre-opping patients appropriately. There is a lot of planning involved in pulling this off, and it seems to be working beautifully so far.

The third shot is from dinner last night, just showing the transformation that our living room undertakes when we have 26 house guests! We are enjoying Gencha's cooking for dinner. (Those of you who have not met Gencha-- pronounced "HEN-cha"-- and sampled her cooking really need to get down here soon and amend that situation!)

The last one I couldn't resist... although it's pretty much a dead give-away about who is and is NOT writing the actual blog entry today... It's taken at the end of the day, when Matt (left couch) and Lance (Carrie's fiance, right couch) had apparently had enough excitement for one day! They were enjoying a well-deserved rest after running errands for us all morning and getting up early to help fix us all breakfast.

More news later... For now, please continue to pray that we are efficient and effective at providing vision-saving care for as many patients as we safely can this week. Tomorrow we're back on our clinic schedule, leaving for San Andres to meet Leslie and Katie there early tomorrow morning.