One Brave Little Lady

This past weekend, we went to Canilla for our regular weekend outing with the Ficker family. Except this time, Matt's parents went with us! We made one minor error by not calling ahead to check the condition of the road between Zacualpa and Canilla, though. It had been in decent shape last week, but we neglected to factor in four days of rain. Oh well. We made it (barely!).

Today was our clinic in San Andres, and it was pretty normal, too, except for a woman who is at term in her 7th pregnancy who came in with headaches and a blood pressure of 160/100. It was her first prenatal visit, so we don't really have a history with her, but the data point we do have tells us she should be in the hospital. Oh, did we mention the baby was breech? Her husband had just bought a cow in the market, though, and needed to get it home, so instead of riding back to Quiche with us, he promised to bring her in the morning. Pray that all of that turns out okay!

Tomorrow we leave for our little adventure to Antigua with six cleft palate kids. One mom showed up at our door this afternoon because it would be pretty hard to get here by the time we need to leave in the morning. No problem. But she brought, along with her cleft lip/palate baby, her 4-year-old son and a 15 year old friend to take care of him. That actually is a problem, since we can only bring the patient and their two parents, at most.

No, she said, it's okay, her son has a cleft palate, too! His lip actually has a scar down the middle, which she says he's had since he was born, but his palate is definitely open. So do we have six patients or seven? We decided to give it a whirl. The hospital knows that six are coming, and we told her that there's no promise that they'll see the seventh, but we'll try.

Heidi asked to see the birth certificates for both kids, since the hospital requires those, and she produced two birth certificates. The problem was that one of them was for her husband, not the 4-year-old. Mom can't read and had grabbed the wrong one!

So we tossed around some potential solutions and decided that the best bet was for Matt to drive the family back home to look for the other birth certificate. It's just over an hour drive, then a 30 minute walk to their house and it was starting to get dark as we were debating the relative merits of that decision.

Mom called her neighbor and asked if someone could go to her house, grab her bag that has all of the family papers in it and walk it to the road to meet us. They said they could. So we drove just over an hour to a house in the middle of nowhere (way after dark now) and there he was with the bag! (The 4 year old cried almost half the way there because he'd never been in a truck before and was scared.) The bummer was that the bag had a dozen or so papers in it - but no birth certificate for Otto. So Mom asked us if we could wait for her while she "ran" back home to look. (She really did promise to run!) So the 15 year old and the 4 year old waited with us in the truck while Mom and the baby went home.

About an hour later, they came back with another friend and the sad news that they couldn't find the papers. We told them that there was nothing we could do tomorrow without them, but that we know of at least two other teams that are coming that we will try to help them with. She was satisfied with that, thanked us for our efforts, sent the 15 year old and the 4 year old home, and got back in the truck with us.

We finally got home after 9pm. The baby had started crying just before we got back and Mom said she had some formula and could make a bottle but needed some water and a stove. That we can help with.

During the time she was warming the formula (which she dutifully boiled for 20 minutes - she's not used to having potable water available), she told us that when she was 1 month pregnant with the baby, her husband was killed in an accident at work. She has seven children and no job. We asked her how she eats. She quoted Luke 12:24 and told us that God takes care of her just like the little birds.

In case you were wondering who this special little child is, her name is Carolina Marcelina Benito Perez. Mom's name is Regina Perez. Please keep the both of them (and the rest of her family, who is without her for two days now) in your prayers this week. As we're writing this, we've only had just a few hours with her, but we are already SO impressed. We can't wait to write on Thursday when we get home with some more pics and stories!!!!

Below are two pics - one of Regina holding Carolina (in our kitchen!) and the other is just Carolina.