Interesting Day

The bad news was that we had to take Matt's parents back to Guatemala City for their flight home. The good news was that we didn't make a wrong turn. Not one time. That's probably a record for us in Guatemala City where the roads are not well labelled and where one wrong turn can lead to a pretty exciting adventure.

We got to do some shopping in The City to prepare for the impending arrival of some students in the next two weeks. We also got to buy some gardening supplies (pray that the spray kills the bugs and not the bushes!)

We got home in time to warm up some leftovers (the pork tenderloin was courtesy of Ernest and Connie Braren - a real treat in a country where the meat leaves a lot to be desired!) and watch another episode from season 1 of Grey's Anatomy (one of our vices - thank you, Carrie!).

About halfway through the show, Duane Ficker called and told us that a gringo friend of his called him on his way here to the hospital tonight and wondered if we could help. Apparently, there was an accident and a young man's foot was quite badly injured. Lamar (the gringo pastor) was driving as fast as he could to get here. He knows that the service here can be spotty sometimes and wanted a little help.

We live here, but we do not work at this hospital. We do have some relationships there, though, that might come in handy from time to time. We couldn't promise much, but we said we'd walk down and try to see what we could do. As we were walking down, an ambulance from San Bartolome pulled in with a car right behind it. (We've done some work in San Bartolome with the Centro de Salud there.)

They brought in a young man, about 15, with a very badly injured foot. Blood was everywhere. The ambulance driver was so stressed out from the drive that he was asking everyone he saw for a light. Christians here frown on smoking, but it was still pretty funny to us.

The pastor, Lamar, is a Mennonite who lives about two hours from here. He had driven this young man about an hour from the scene of the accident to the Centro de Salud in San Bartolome. From there, it's another hour here. We don't know what the roads look like between the accident scene and the Centro de Salud, but from there to here, they're horrible.

The accident involved an overloaded pickup that stalled out on a hill, then the brakes failed. It rolled backwards and smashed this kid's foot between the tailgate and a hill. It's pretty bad. He has at least three broken bones in his foot, the foot is ripped open quite badly on the top, and was spurting blood from an artery.

Luckily, one of the best surgeons we know at this hospital is on call tonight. They immediately addressed the situation, started an IV, administered pain meds, tied off the bleeding artery, cleaned the wound, and dressed it to prepare him for surgery later tonight. Whether he gets to keep the foot or not remains to be seen, but they are doing everything they can here at the hospital.

Now comes the matter of the police. We're not sure at this point (11:30 pm) whether the driver of the truck is going to be arrested or not. He's a member of the church, as is the young man who was injured. The police are being quite nice, though, and have agreed to at least let Lamar, one young man who came with them, and possibly the driver spend the night here at our house instead of at the police station. Their point is that the driver didn't just flee, he actually sought help for the kid and helped drive him here.

So we're setting up one of our six "guest rooms" for the pastor and these two young men he brought with him. They hadn't eaten in several hours, so we fed them, made some coffee, and gave them some jackets to wear - it's in the 50s now and they showed up in t-shirts (what they'd been wearing all day).

So Matt will be sitting up for a while to see what happens with this whole situation and whether or not we have some houseguests tonight. Heidi went to bed since she has to work at the Hospital Buen Samaritano tomorrow. We'll let you know what happened...