Busy Weekend

Sometimes our weekend trips to Canilla/San Andres are uneventful, relaxing weekends with a lot of spiritual "topping off the tanks". This was not one of those. Not that it was bad - far from it - it was just not "uneventful".

Saturday morning began around 6:00am with a phone call. It's not customary for people here to introduce themselves on the phone, they just start talking - which usually starts the guessing game. After a few minutes on the line, we determined that this caller was the father of a boy we've been looking for in Chicabracan. The Sisters at Ceritas informed us that they had encountered a 13-year-old boy with a cleft lip and wondered if we could help him. The problem was that they didn't know how to contact him.

At our clinic in Chicabracan last week, we asked if anyone in line knew of an older boy with a cleft lip (it's not a big place, Chicabracan). Of course, someone knew him. So we sent our phone number with them and asked them to have the boy's family call us. So they did. At 6am on a Saturday. Oh well, we had to get up anyway!

Clinic in Canilla was actually very short, for some reason. Apparently, nearly everyone around town was feeling just fine on Saturday. So we had a long afternoon to hang out with the Fickers. We built some concrete forms for work that needs to be done at the hangar, we netted 50 fish out of one pond and brought them to another, etc. - all normal stuff in a day in Canilla.

It was nice and warm, though (sorry for those of you living in snowland right now), so we hung out near the fishpond behind the house. The second picture is what happens to girls like Katie who stand too close to a body of water when boys like Joe are around. (The first pic is a shot from the road on our drive there in the morning.)

The third pic is what Heidi looks like when she's done with clinic. The creature in her overalls is, possibly, an even more loving cat than Jake - and a good mouser, too. (Jake did quite well this week, though, with at least two rats that we counted.)

As we sat down to watch our movie and eat some dessert that Heidi made, we were interrupted by someone at the gate. Joe went out to find out what they wanted and returned to let us know that it was an emergency and someone was bleeding, but we should wait to see this next scene in the movie real quick before we go out there. (He doesn't get worked up too easily.)

It turned out that the emergency was simply a guy who had had a bit too much to drink before he ventured out onto a dirt road on his motorcycle. He'll have some nice scars for his trouble, but he'll live. Basically, just a clean-up job.

This morning, well before any of us had any intention of waking up, someone else came to the gate and demonstrated some considerable proficiency at operating their car horn. It was a local midwife with a 14-year-old patient. She had been laboring since 3am and the midwife wanted to check with our ultrasound to see if the baby was head down (cephalic) and not breech. It took Heidi about two minutes to decide that this baby was either going to be born in the clinic room or in the car on the way back to her house.

So about 30 minutes later, we had a new baby with us. It was Matt's first opportunity to watch Heidi deliver a baby and he didn't pass out or anything. The fourth pic is of the mom and her first baby, a little girl.

Clinic in San Andres was relatively uneventful except for the family we brought back to Quiche with us in the back of our truck. They have a baby who Leslie believes is pretty sick. It's a testament to our faith in her opinion that we never really even looked at the baby, we just brought them all here to the hospital.

Well, that's about it for now. Tomorrow we are hosting most of the local American healthcare providers for our periodic networking get together. We'll be meeting two missionary doctors who are coming in from Guatemala City for the meeting, too, and we are very excited about that!