David Ficker came over in the morning - or at least tried to. He lost a head gasket on the way over, so his truck will be spending a little time at Martin's house.
The workers have been finishing the work that the backhoe started. They're smoothing out the ground now by hand. They're being paid by the job, not by the hour, so the fact that they seem to be taking their time doesn't bother us so much!
David and Matt went to a few places in town and ordered two truckloads of rock (10 cubic meters each), 150 bags of concrete, 100 lbs of wire, 100 lbs of rebar, and some steel trussing. The workers ordered two truckloads of "selecto" - basically clean dirt and two truckloads of sand. Naturally, three delivery trucks showed up all at the same time. A truckload of rock first, which parked directly in the way of the concrete guys. Then, while they were working, the "selecto" truck dumped a dump truck load of dirt in the driveway that the other guys needed to use to leave. Fun, fun. No worries, we got everyone out, eventually. They seemed not to be at all surprised or rattled by any of this.
The truckload of rock - for those of you who don't know, 10 cubic meters of crushed rock is A LOT! - had to been unloaded by three guys with shovels. They don't have a dump truck. So they load the thing FROM THE GROUND by hand, throwing the rock up over their heads, then unload the thing from the truck, tossing the rock down on the ground. Amazing.
At 7:30 this morning, we got a knock on the door. Our friend, Regina (mother of Carolina - our first cleft lip patient), came by with her son Isaias so we could show them where their speech therapy place is. Isaias has an unrepaired cleft palate and is 16 years old. The team that came down in January said that the best thing we can do for him now is speech therapy. We have a lot of faith in them, so off to speech therapy he goes!
Regina brought along another family from her village who has a son with a microtia (malformed ear) and a new baby with a cleft lip. This makes us think that we probably need to set up a visit to her village. We'll be trying to contact the mayor and a pastor there maybe next week.
Anyway, this baby was born on December 19, making him nearly three months old, and he weighed in this morning at 6lbs 3oz. His palate is open, as well as his lip, so he can't really suck. We spent a lot of time with Mom and Dad (with Regina translating) explaining how to mix formula, demonstrating for them how to feed the baby (Tomas Mateo) with a syringe, and then how to clean the mixing bottle, the syringes, and everything.
It's helpful to have Regina translate, because she has been shown how to do all of this and can explain it to them from the perspective of someone who's done it and has a healthy baby with a repaired lip and palate to show for it.
We gave the dad three bottles of water to help them get started with the process of mixing formula. He had clearly never dealt with bottled water before. He wanted to know if he had to boil this water, too. No, we explained, this is pre-boiled (more or less) and it makes it easier for them to be able to feed the baby when they're away from home. Their water at home (pulled from a river) has to be boiled for 20 minutes, then mixed with formula and fed to the baby. Afterwards, the bottles have to be washed and soaked in bleach-water. We also gave them some bleach and explained how to make the bleach-water. Again, Regina was very helpful!
The rest of the morning, Annie, Beth, and Heidi will be working in the pharmacy. In the afternoon, they have an abdominal hysterectomy to do in Chichicastenango at the Hospital Buen Samaritano.
The pics below are pretty self-explanatory. The first one is of the dirt truck dumping its load below the rock truck that's being unloaded by hand. The next ones are of our visitors from this morning. The black dot is because there are plenty of weird people on the internet and we're not going to help them be weird.
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