Good times!

We have had some good times these last few weeks hosting a couple of medical groups and a marraige seminar.

In this last group we had about 50 people total when counting the american and guatemalan staff. Most of the americans were from Edmond, Oklahoma with a few others scattered about. In the group was our brother in law, Charlie and his mom, Sandy. We had clinics for 3 days in 2 locations each day, and we cared for about 600 patients, both medical and dental. Most of the patients were dental as we have found the medical clinics are not so large since we have more of a presence in the communties on a regular basis. Also, this last group was here during the All Saints holiday which affected some of the clinic turn outs.

We continue to see a huge need for dental assistance in the communities and thanks to the blessings that God provides, Health Talents and supporters we have a dentist who has now started with us and we are in the process of arranging his schedule. The dentist is Marcos Lux and he is Josefina's brother. Marcos was a scholarship recipient of the HTI Bates Scholarship program. He will be in the central clinic, Clinica Caris, in Lemoa 2 days a week and mobile the other days. Going mobile with dentistry is a little more difficult but we are up for the challenge!
Marcos has his official graduation this Monday. Here is an interesting fact - out of around 100 students who started dental school with him 6 years ago, less than 10 will graduate this year. The others may take 2 to 4 more years to graduate.

This last week was also the start of us providing teeth cleanings through 2 of our health promoters, Gaspar and Tomas. We are extremely grateful to have men such as these who are leaders in their churches, communities, and are willing to learn and serve in any manner that they can. To see a picture of Gaspar, see Sheri's blog at http://www.sheriinguate.blogspot.com/.
We are still not very good at getting pictures! Anyway, we know have the equipment to be able to perform teeth cleanings each day we are clinic provided we have enough volunteers from the churches, which we do not see as a problem! To our surprise we have many people interested in this service.

This week we also received a replacement laptop for Lisa (got a great deal on a Gateway) so today has been computer day - you forget what a pain it is to set up a new computer with all of the data, etc. Things were going well until my pc lost it's screen, so now we are having fun with that as well. The Dell rep from India gave me some things to try and if no luck we will see if we can have it worked on in the US. Right now we will just use it as a desktop with a monitor!

Thanks for checking in with us and we will work on getting some photos. In the meantime check out Sheri's blog - she is much better at photos that I am!