Ground has officially been broken for the hospital, of course, first of all. The Nursing, English, and Premed school is up and going strong. The new home has been moved into, and renovations are under way to turn the big house in to two apartment homes for the doctors who will need to stay here. Work is being done on laboratory equipment, the pharmacy, the water system, fences, and hearts! Days are long and nights are short, but love abounds and most of all we see so very, very clearly the joy of serving Christ lived out in a way that few are privileged to see in this world.
The Fickers (and all of the "honorary Fickers" that are part of this place) are an amazing family, truly on fire for The Lord and His work. Read more about them, if you haven't already, at adonaiinternationalministries.org and be sure to link to some of the blogs from there. And if you ever have any extra funds lying around and are looking for a way that they could go to further the Kingdom of God here on Earth, feel free to send them here ;-)
Today we got to do clinic in Chumisa-- Leslie, Dr. Jared Cardwell, and I saw about 100 people with just our two Quiché translators, who are likely even more exhausted than we are tonight! About 30 prenatal care visits and bazillions of general consults later, I do have some pictures and stories to tell… the first pictures are just of beautiful Flor, one of our translators, and some of our first prenatal patients today.
Flor has really gotten good at ultrasounds, and it was fun to work with her some more today on doing prenatal care and being sure to point out what is abnormal and how to deal with it. One example is a lady who is just 14 weeks pregnant and has very high blood pressure, which meets the criteria for a diagnosis of chronic hypertension even though she is very, very young! We went through what we would need to do to manage her and what to watch for in this pregnancy and if you all could continue to pray for Manuela Barrera, that would be great.
The last picture is one of our last patients-- he is 87 years old, and his complaints were that he can't see or hear and has no energy to walk in his legs! (Never mind that he probably walked many miles to get to clinic today) His ears are clogged with wax, although he probably has some age-related hearing loss, too. His eyes are blocked with cataracts. And his legs are really just fine but understandably tired! The picture doesn't really capture what I was trying to, which was him leaning closely in to Flor as she was yelling near the top of her lungs to tell him about his treatments. After that failed, the man standing next to him tried the same thing at even louder volume. Everyone got a kick out of it, and I'm not at all sure if the man understood any of the instructions but he definitely felt paid attention to!
Tonight we are all relaxing around a table full of tacos and hopefully will rest a bit this evening. Not sure what tomorrow holds, but then… do we ever really know that?
God is good. God is sovereign. God knows. And that is enough.
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