DATELINE: Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Clinic Day 2

I awoke at 6a. Three days in on my Central American journey with much hard work and astoundingly I still didn’t ache at all. Not even my feet, which had stood for over 12 hours the day before, (in flip-flops, no less!) had so much as a tingle of pain. Granted, I wasn't going to make the mistake of wearing flip-flops to the clinic again--it was going to be Skechers all the way for me that day--but I was thankful not to be in the agony I expected. I hoped Ashley was in similar good foot health. Back home, I'm the guy who usually rubs her feet after she's been on them all day. I guessed here she'd have to do it herself, or find someone else. She had mentioned yesterday that her feet and ankles were swollen from all the heat and standing. She's not the only one in that boat, either. Beyond my own sausage-like calves, once down at the pavillion I see quite a few other people, women and men both, trying to rub some of the blood out of their legs too.

Breakfast was eggs, black beans, pineapple, mango and cantalope, bacon and toast. It was wonderful! My usual low carb diet doesn’t allow me many black beans and I love black beans. So I took full advantage of my planned two weeks of cheating and chowed down.

At 7:30, after morning devotions, we loaded up our supplies and headed back to the bus station for Clinic Day 2.

Despite our hard work the day before, everyone seemed energetic and ready to go. Everyone but Flo. Flo is a good friend of ours from Ashley's class in med-school. She's just a wonderful soul all around, but that morning she looked as though she was about to fall over. Of all of the students on our team, Flo is probably the most experienced with mission work. This is her third two-week Central American mission trip. And just before flying to Guatemala, she had come from a six-week medical rotation/mission in China. It was a difficult rotation for her during which she was stationed in an orphanage, filled with children that had been abandoned by their parents due to birth-defects. Many of the children may yet recieve operations to correct conditions such as cleft-pallets and the like, but others are far more difficult cases. We had been receiving e-mail updates from Flo throughout her time in China and knew that she was becoming more and more emotionally wiped out as the weeks passed. Her attitude throughout it, though, was one of faithful and obedient service to God. Unfortunately, Flo had been up for 36 hours on her way from China to Guatemala and her weakened system picked up a virus along the way and it was really keeping her energy down. I'd never before seen Flo with so little spark in her and it hurt to see her as miserable as I imagined she was that morning. I don't think it mattered much to her, though. She's a trooper when it comes to the work at hand and serving God.

After morning devotional, we headed back to the clinic site. So energetic was our mood that an impromptu limbo game broke out. Emilio won by quite a margin, but mostly it was just for fun.

Before we could even put away our freshly counted meds from the night before, Marcello brought us a present: our very own fan. Now we could have our own never-ending stream of blissful cooling wind. The fan made a huge difference in the comfort level of the pharmacy cage. We still had to contend with patients blocking the wind, but we angled it in such a way that it could usually blow through the door of the cage and still get to us.

We came out at 8 for our introductions to the crowd of patients. Just as we expected, there were far more patients on day two than day one. There had to be twice as many people there. As daunting as this might seem, though, it was all fine with us. After all, seeing and witnessing to as many patients as we could was why we were there in the first place.

Once the clinic began, we found that things felt better for us than they had on Monday. We didn't change anything as far as the pharmacy’s layout went, but somehow we seemed to be better set up than the day before. Maybe we just had our sea-legs under us and know where everything was, but the work seemed to go far more smoothly. We also had additional help in the form of David, a 16-year-old kid from back home in WV who is the son of Dr. Lally. I'd actually met David at my local comic shop a year or so back. Turns out he was old hat at mission work, having been on several with his mom, and he’d worked in mission pharmacies before. His presence was a considerable help to us throughout the day.

With things not so stressful, we finally had time to chat with Esdras (who at that point was our only translator for the day). Esdras was from Guatemala City where he was at seminary studying to become a youth pastor. He learned English in school and seemed pretty fluent in it. Far far better than I am at Spanish. For day two, Esdras taught Mary Ann and I a new phrase: Dios te Bendiga (God be with you). It's a fantastic closing line for the pharmacy. Until then, I'd felt really odd passing people's prescriptions to them and not having any decent parting words for them, other than to say "de nada" when they said "Gracias." It just didn't seem right to me. But "Dios te Bendiga" was perfect, though often the patients would say it to me before I could say it to them.

Since we had things under control in the pharmacy, we each took some time to wander out of the cage now and then for brief walks through the clinic hallway. The hallway itself was lined with plastic patio chairs in which patients sat to await their turn with the docs, the dentists and the docs and dentists-in-training. I made it a point to smile at everyone, especially the children. Almost always, the patients smiled back, allowing us to cut through the language barrier.

Since both our team and the team from Racine brought loads and loads of toys and crayons and fun things for children, I was starting to feel left out that we didn’t have any of that sort of thing in the pharm-cage to hand out to kids. I did have some bubble stuff, a few toy cars and some juggling balls stashed away, but I hadn’t broken into that stash yet. The bus station was also kind of close quarters for juggling or bubbles. So instead, I got a bag of candy from one of our suitcases full of goodies and and loaded up the cell phone pocket of my shorts with peppermints. Throughout the day, whenever I saw kids who didn’t seem to be having a good time, I would pull out a mint and offer it to help brighten things up. Or so I thought.

During one of my sojourns into the hallway, I spied just such an unhappy little boy. He was probably 1 or 2 years old, seated on one of the plastic chairs next to his mother’s chair and he was just throwing the most enormous tantrum. The mom had been given a stuffed animal and was trying to coax him into being quiet with it. He wasn’t having any of that, though. He shoved it aside and kept right on squawling. Then I walked up. In my head, I envisioned the joy his face would take on when I offered him a piece of candy. His little eyes would dry up and all his woes from before would vanish as he accepted it. This in mind, I reached into my pocket and held out the piece of candy to him. The little boy stopped crying, peered at the candy in my hand, then reached out and shoved my hand away as hard as he could and started screaming even louder. It was disappointing and hilarious at the same time.

Another attempt to charm kids worked far better. Even though we didn’t have a lot of candy and toys in the pharm-cage, we did have something cooler. We had a bag of little plastic pen-lights donated to us by one of the drug-reps who regularly visit Doctor Allen. They're just little four-inch plastic tubes that light up at one end when you squeeze the pocket clip. When I ran low on candy in my side-pocket, I loaded up with pen-lights. These I saved, because most of the kids we saw at the pharmacy already had either toys or crayons and coloring pages or something equally good that they were given at the other medical/dental stations. Sometimes, though, I’d see a kid who didn’t seem to have been given anything like that.

Sure enough, that afternoon I spied a little boy who only had a toothbrush. After catching his attention, I shined one of the penlights at him and saw his expression light up just like the pen had. I passed it to him and he grinned and said “Gracias” then dashed away. A little while later, I saw him again. He was waiting near the pharmacy and was playing with his pen-light while his little sister looked on with interest. She didn’t have anything cool, either. I ran back to the pharm-cage and dug up another pen light, which I gave to the little girl. She too lit up, making my heart sing.

On Tuesday, we didn’t see any sights that were as harrowing as those from Monday’s clinic.

In fact, a number of patients were so pleased at having been treated that they wanted to give us all hugs after we filled their prescriptions. This was wonderful. It was kind of like receiving a tip for a job well-done.

I did hear about of a couple of amazing patients later on, though. One was an 89 year old woman who was no longer able to walk properly and was in real need of a wheelchair. Dr. Allen decided to buy her one with his own money, brought and earmarked for just that sort of thing. It would take a day for Marcello to arrange for its purchase and delivery, but the woman was overjoyed.

Another patient was a 101 year old man. Living past age 100 is a miracle in any country, but especially in this part of Guatemala, where life is generally pretty hard. The man was in fantastic health, though. The optometry station set him up with a pair of reading glasses and he was given vitamins, but beyond that he wasn’t really ailing. The major news about him, though, was that at age 101, he accepted Christ.

The only real trouble we had in the pharmacy was with our glucometers. One of the major diabetic supplies companies donated a suitcase full of glucometers that we were giving out to patients who'd been diagnosed as having diabetes. Mary Ann, fortunately, knew how to operate them and taught Esdras and me how. The only trouble came when we found that some of the batteries in the glucometers had run down, so we frequently had to go rummaging through the Glucometer suitcase to find working Glucometers. By the end of the week, we had taken the time to go through and test everything and separate the wheat from the chaff, as these things go. But early on it was a minor wrench in the works.

We wound up seeing far more patients on Tuesday than the day before.

Once again, my brain cut out around 4:30 and my functionality dramatically decreased. This didn’t help us at all, especially when it came to packing up the pharmacy at the end of the day. We were only scheduled to do the two clinic days in Chiquimuilla and so we had to pack everything up after clinic that evening. The plan was to drive all the supplies to our next clinic site, in Pasaco, where we would set it up again before heading back to camp. The only problem with this was that the pharmacy is always the very last station to finish up because we’re the last place patients come. So we had to fill all the prescriptions for all the patients before we could really start tearing down the store.

I did try to get ahead of this by piling all of our stock meds—such as the 50 bottles of liquid Ibuprophen and Tylenol and other standard drugs we had a lot of—in Emilio's now empty cubby hole next door. My plan was to get all the in-pharmacy meds together with their stock counterparts so we could see how much of any given drug we had. I also wanted to organize the whole shebang as we packed it up by doing so in alphabetical order. This would make set up at Pasaco far easier, (or so I thought). As tired as we all were and as little as my brain was functioning, none of this was simple.

I’m pretty sure there were some people on the team who weren’t too happy with me for not just chunking it all in suitcases and sorting it out later. My method certainly took much longer and everyone wanted to just go. The way I saw it, the organization would HAVE to be done sometime that night and would tie things up either there or in Pasaco, so it might as well be there. I did not want a repeat of Monday’s pharmacy set up at our new location. I wanted to have everything organized so we could just put it on shelves (assuming we had any).

The other problem with my method is that it was not a group project. Sure, we could yell “Chorpheniramine!” and someone in the hall would grab up our stock of Chlortrimeton and bring it in to us, but otherwise it was best to have as few people in the cage as possible. So Ashley and I did most of the med-packing, in REVERSE alphabetical order, leaving Mary Ann and a few others to tidy up supplies. It really only took about 20 minutes to do, but it seemed like far longer. We had one last look around our now empty site and then headed for the bus.

"Goodbye pharmacy cage. You were miserable to work in, but you did your job well."

On the bus we learned that we would not be headed to Pasaco for setup after all but were headed back to camp instead. We’d had a pretty late day of it and were not in need of another huge unloading session just yet.

Back at the camp, we watched another slide show of the day’s photos, while we ate, and we all rejoiced at the happy faces among the photos of the patients and the beautiful children. It’s fantastic to see photos of people as they are being helped. We don’t get to see a lot of that in the pharmacy, even with our frequent walks through the clinic in the day. Just seeing the faces displayed on the screen makes all our work so worth it.

After the show, we had our evening devotional and heard the testimony of one of the local staff. We also learned that a great many of the missionary and translator staff had stayed on the bus and had gone to unload all the equipment at our new clinic site, sparing us from having to do it in the morning. I'm all at once grateful that they did this and upset that more work was taken off Gringo shoulders and put on the local staff. We greet the missionaries and translators with huge applause as they return to eat the well-deserved plates of food that had been set aside for them.

Butch had purchased a pre-paid cellphone so that team-members could call home if they needed to. The phone had been available since day one of the mission, but neither Ashley nor I had used it to phone home. After we were dismissed, I borrowed it to finally do so sinec we figured someone back home ought to know we made it okay. Granted, both sets parents knew that no news is good news when it comes to this sort of work, but it’s always nice to get SOME news. I considered calling Ashley’s parents and having them call mine. However, it was 10 p back home and they would be very much asleep. So I called my dad, whom I knew would still be up. He was very happy to hear from us. I could sense that he seemed to want to talk longer, maybe to tell me of his latest adventures with Venusian flu or something similar, but he cut himself short, realizing we only had time for a touching of bases at 60 cents per minute. Dad said he would phone Red & Susie the next day and let them know we were fine.

GUATEMALA CLINIC DAY 2 STATS
Patients Seen: 540
Prescriptions Filled: 508
Salvations/Rededications: 160
- posted by Eric Fritzius @ 10:57 AM