Day 4 Community of La Devis, Choloma

A much healthier start to our day as we got all our ill members back on the road and only left one behind to rest and recoup.  It is important to rest a day rather than go out sick and then not feel better the next day as well.  And we don't always know God's plan.  Yesterday when the housekeeper came in to clean the room she talked to one of our number who had stayed behind that day.  As it turns out, the housekeepers daughter is pregnant and they can't afford prenatal vitamins.  Her lucky day!  That is one medicine we have tons of.   So because we had someone stay back, a new mother gets to have the medicine her baby needs.  If we had all gone out on day 3 who knows if we would have known about the housekeepers family.  It all works out.

Today we saw 234 patients compared to 159 yesterday.  We got off to a very sad start with an elderly woman with diabetes whose toes are black and there is a very large ulcer on her leg.  Having no basin to clean her wounds, we used a gallon zip lock bag and cleaned and soaked her leg and rebandaged.    We talked about seeing a surgeon but she has no desire to have surgery at 86 years of age.   She received a grocery bag full of bandaging materials and pain meds and diabetes meds and antibiotics and lots of prayer. We also saw a lady who was 100!

 The building team painted the Mennonite church today.  At one point a spontaneous worship service broke out with everyone singing and praying.  A very moving occasion.  At lunch time we noticed that Aurora, the lovely woman who feeds us while we are here, always has enough food no matter who comes in to eat.  Not just us anglos, but an unknown number of community helpers.  Aurora could feed 5000 I think.  And have left overs.

Today is like the last day of work this week since tomorrow we will be in Pastor Juan's community and that is like going home.  We will see familiar faces come through the line.  Pastor Juan has been out working with us several days this week.  I think we are all looking forward to Friday and then home or Copan, but so far it has been a good week and many people have been helped.  When people tell you they have pain and you ask them if pain medicine helps them and they say, "yes, but we can't afford it", that is distressing to me.  First off, these people work hard at manual labor, long days and they hurt at the end of the day.  And then they live with that pain because they can't run down to the CVS and get a bottle of Motrin.  So they live with their pain.  When our kids get a cold we give them something out of the medicine cabinet, which is always full of cough syrup, tylenol or whatever.  Here they can't, unless they have been to a mama clinic recently.  We try to load the families up on pain meds and cough syrup and micronutrients and vitamins!  We fill their medicine cabinet as  best we can.


But, maybe the best thing we do is show people that we care about them.