Nueva Santa Catarina

This morning, the alarm went off at 5:30 so we could get up and head to Nueva Santa Catarina. Isaac and Heidi had already been up for a while. Ewww! Isaac is falling asleep pretty early now which translates to pretty early mornings. We could try to keep him up later, but he turns from cute to monster at about 5pm, so...

Anyway, Nueva Santa Catarina is a little village about two hours away on some of the best roads in Guatemala (which ain't saying much, but at least they're paved). The good news is that our repaired truck isn't leaking antifreeze all over the floor anymore, but the bad news is that we think we're smelling another small leak. Time will tell. We'll keep an eye on it.

When we arrived at clinic this morning, one of our chronic seizure patients was sitting inside the church. He had just seized while waiting for us to arrive. If it hadn't been for two construction zones, we probably would have been there. Unfortunately, in his post-seizure state, he couldn't answer many questions, but we did our best to help him and will definitely pray for him a lot.

This clinic is at 10,000 ft altitude and the dry season just started, so everyone has dry, itchy skin, sore throats, headaches, and just general dehydration symptoms. We also saw a young girl with a rash we couldn't identify, so we're sending pictures to a dermatologist friend in the United States. Nothing really serious today, but we'll probably make some big quality of life changes in a bunch of people with simple OTC meds.

One group of three women came in who needed some evangelizing and Matilde (our translator and the pastor at the church) took over from there. It's nice to have him there. Evangelism isn't a big strength for either of us, especially in K'iche. We do our best, but it's better to have someone who really has a gift for it, right?

Many of you have followed our exciting adventures with vehicles. Well, thanks to some generous donations, we are in the process of looking for a vehicle in the United States to drive back down through Mexico after Christmas. We pretty much have the "looking for" part covered, but we could always use a few extra bucks to help buy the vehicle and pay the transport costs back to Guatemala (the best way through Mexico is on toll roads - fewer police looking for bribes, etc.) We're buying used, so we're not asking to help buy leather seats and satellite navigation systems, but just a reliable 4x4 to help us get to our clinics and make emergency runs when necessary. We're a 501(c)(3) organization, so donations are tax deductible. We try not to ask for money very often, and when we do we try to ask for direct donations for patient care, but if we can't get to our clinics, we can't help the people. Anyway, if you feel led to help in this way, we'll get you in touch with the necessary folks in Houston. End of commercial (sorry about that!)

Tonight we're entertaining some American friends who live here in Quiche. He's a volunteer fireman and they're both English teachers. They're a fun young couple we really enjoy hanging out with.

Tomorrow we're working on the truck and getting ready to go up into the jungle. Wednesday, we'll go over to Canilla, celebrate Thanksgiving a day early, then go to bed. Thursday morning, we will send at least one truck really early in the morning up to Saquixpec with all our equipment and meds. If the runway looks good, Duane can start flying doctors and nurses in. It'll save them 8 hours on the road if we can. The flight is only 15 minutes (crazy, right?). Yes, these roads are quite bad! We usually take at least one truck out of commission on each trip...

So here's a pic of Isaac hanging out with some of his Guatemalan friends outside clinic.