Long but Smooth Travel Day!

I am so thankful to God once again for safe travels and another opportunity to spend time with so many people in this land that Matt and I have come to love over the years through His grace and guidance! Today was a very long travel day, but I am finally here getting unpacked and settled in for a nice long night’s sleep, I hope! I left home at about 2 o’clock this morning, which is about midnight local time, and arrived here in Chichicastenango about 4:30 p.m.!

I realized too late—as in yesterday!—that I had left everyone hanging on the pathology results from the last trip and for that I apologize. I had heard from Dr. Hoak just a few weeks after returning home that all was well with all of the reports. Nohemi turned out to have a benign tumor after all, which is wonderful. It is such a blessing to have such great follow-up on pathology reports and how patients are doing after flying home again, and something that is really quite unique to the short-term trips that I do here as far as short-term missions go in general. For that I am truly grateful.

This trip is a little bit different in that I do not have any other surgeons or anesthesia help travelling with me. With Dr. Hoak also being up in the States with his family this month, we prayed very hard over what I should try to do on this trip and have felt like it is not my calling to operate any during this particular week. I am certainly open to the possibility of something more urgent than usual coming up, though, so please pray for wisdom and guidance as I evaluate the patients who come in this week.

The hope is to set up quite a few surgeries for us to do in November, when I am VERY excited that I will have one of my Faculty colleagues as WELL as one of the Chief Residents in our program joining me! That will be an amazing trip both from a medical/surgical as well as personal/spiritual standpoint, I hope! This trip is hopefully going to be a lot more about reconnecting with the people here—both the locals and the long-term missionaries—as time might permit a little more liberally if I am not in the OR until all hours of the day and night each day. My bags are packed with everything from charger cords left behind recently in the U.S. to silly toys and things for the Ficker girls to bags of excess toys to take out to remote clinics to eventually be given out at Christmas to small gifts for the Church members that I can’t wait to see tomorrow to vitamins and a few medications! If TSA looked through them, I’m sure they are still scratching their heads pretty good… There is, of course, also plenty of suture, other OR disposable supplies, gloves, masks, glucose test strips, and lots of other medical goodies that are mixed in there. And yes, they are bulky and heavy! They did, for the first time in a LONG time, wave me right through Customs today without X-raying my bags looking for things they didn’t want me to bring in for free, so that was probably the biggest blessing of the day!

Later in the week I will be going out to the Fickers to hopefully help them with a “jornada” or mobile medical clinic out in the jungle areas to the north of them—many of our regular readers will recognize the Zona Reina area as one they have been trying to reach for years now, and we are hoping to make a little bit more progress on those relationships this week, Lord willing.

Thank you all for your continued interest and support of our mission here. Please always let me know if you want to get more involved or if you have any questions! And thank you especially for your prayers for safety and wisdom this week. God bless you all!