Nueva Santa Catarina

Today was our clinic up in the mountains in Nueva Santa Catarina. We got to bring Katie along, as she's spending a few days with us.

The first picture is with Katie, Heidi, Matilde (the pastor and translator) and some of the folks gathered outside the clinic/church. They still have benches piled up inside the church because attendance has been swelling on Sundays. Praise God!

We had our regular patients today, who we've started to become quite good friends with. They ask about our families, we know their families, and we get to joke around with each other during the consult.

One of our patients returned today actually using his walker instead of his wheelchair! He was involved in a horrible accident in Houston a few years ago and was lucky he wasn't killed. He nearly lost both legs and is pins and plates from one end to the other. He spent nearly three months at Ben Taub Hospital there and came back to Guatemala walking a little bit. When we saw him for the first time, though, he was using the wheelchair exclusively. Rehabbing an exploded leg cannot be fun, but it's necessary if you ever want to walk again. We convinced him, over time, that it was better to walk around, even with a limp, then be confined to a wheelchair the rest of his life. He came today to find out when Dr. Edgar (our orthopedic surgeon friend) is going to be at ASELSI again so he can get some pins removed from his knees.

The second picture below is just a shot inside the church/clinic with Katie, Heidi, a patient, and Matilde.

The third pic is of Heidi holding an incredibly cute kid who we initially thought was quite sick until he actually woke up and started playing around. On the scale of sick and not sick, not sick. We treated him for a mild case of diarrhea, though, and sent Mom on her way, happy to know that he wasn't in any grave danger. (Kids do die from diarrhea here.)

The fourth pic is five kids (out of eight) and their mom who came in all completely covered with scabies (bug bites). The good news is that we have treatment for that. The bad news is that it includes Mom having to wash all of their clothes, including sheets and pillow cases, in very hot water, all at one time. Needless to say, she doesn't have a washing machine. We just sentenced her to a very long day of washing clothes. Bummer.

The other bummer is that we gave them all of the cream we had to treat the scabies with. And fifteen minutes later, another complete family came in covered with scabies! No worries, they live right next to the church. We had planned to run into Quetzaltenango (about an hour down the road) after clinic anyway and do some grocery shopping (and running shoes for Katie). So we bought some more cream there and dropped it off at the church on our way back.

Tomorrow we take Katie back to her clinic in Chiminicijuan and we'll probably stay and try not to get in the way too much. Then Wednesday Heidi is back at Buen Samaritano where she'll actually have a male patient, probably. A local pastor we worked with called the other night quite concerned about his cough and cold symptoms. After a few minutes of asking questions, Heidi was able to assure him that he'll probably live until Wednesday when she can have him come by the hospital, get a quick exam, and get some relief in the form of good old fashioned American over-the-counter meds.