Monday in Chujuyub

Today started rather early. Katie's friend Malachi spent the night here last night after doing clinic with us on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. His plan was to catch the 3am chicken bus to Xela to be there in time for his morning class. So Matt got up and took him to get his bus. Waking up at 2:30am is never fun, but a lot easier when you consider how early we go to bed here (we don't have TV).

Today was our third time in Chujuyub, the small village where our friend Regina lives. Since Isaac has started crawling, he's less interested in being penned up in his pack-and-play, so it's awfully nice to have help in clinic. Katie and Hannah drove over from Canilla to give us that help. Three clinicians can move about twice as fast as one (because we actually like each other and spend a wee bit of time chatting amongst ourselves) and it allowed us to not have to turn away patients. We had around 50 today. There's no way Heidi could have seen that many by herself with Isaac in the room.

This afternoon, we're working on some last minute details for the Women's Team who is coming in in June. Proving that there's no possible way to make a system... well... Guatemala proof, Heidi went down to the hospital to talk to them just a few minutes ago and the hospital director had no idea the team was coming (in three weeks). We have a letter that we've distributed to all of the key hospital personnel that we made them sign to prove that they've seen it (typically, when a team comes in, at least one key person will swear up and down that they didn't know the team was coming, even when we KNOW we gave that person the letter two months before).

This time, though, we had given the letter to Dr. Patty's secretary, who is usually one of the most dependable people around. She didn't give it to Dr. Patty, which was surprising to everyone, including Dr. Patty.

Anyway, we'll spend most of tomorrow filing paperwork with the government to obtain permission for the team to operate here. And we think that Duane, David, Ryan, and Joe may be flying in to do the rough electrical work on the addition to the dorm. (We say "we think" because we found out that they had to make an emergency medical flight this morning which pretty much messed up their plans for today and may push a few of those plans into tomorrow, which may push the electrical work out a day, too.) Those medical patients sure are inconvenient, aren't they?

Wednesday will be a bit more paperwork, a recording session in the evening at a local church (please pray a whole lot for this, it has all the makings of a sonic disaster), and then we get up early Thursday morning for a flight to the US to reset our visas. Our 90 days will be up early next week and Guatemala doesn't take as kindly to illegal aliens as the US does.

In pictures, the first is a pic of the three girls all seeing patients. The second is of Heidi teaching Katie how to drain a cyst. The third is of a few of the patients in the waiting area - sitting in front of the two 4Runners. The fourth is one of two twins who came in today. Mom and Dad were hoping we would give them some free milk. The good news is that the babies are growing great. Yes, it's a bit of work for Mom to breastfeed twins, but it's so much better (and safer in a country that doesn't have access to clean water to wash bottles) for her to breastfeed. We weighed them and told them to come back next month and we'll look at them again. If they're still growing well, it's more breastmilk. If things start turning south, we'll see what we can do to help them out.

And the last pic is of Heidi, Katie, Hannah, and Isaac.