Sunday

Today is Sunday and we have sun today!!! We have visiting with us a brother from the church in Montellano who wanted to visit our area and attend the big conference in Mactzul VI tomorrow. So we are enjoying showing him around and took our usual walk to town and around market this morning. It's a beautiful day, sunny and about 70 degrees. He makes us laugh, because he looks like a gringo and has a gringo name (his dad was English), but only speaks spanish. In market, everyone thinks he's a tourist. After making it back home, Tony made us some of his famous shrimp ceviche and we headed back to town for worship services. On the walk back home we stopped to buy ice cream pops at a local home-owned place and chatted with the owner Arnulfo Afre. He told us about his ice cream business (he sells about 150 a day of 7 different flavors) and his 18 parakeets he has. Then he gifted us another flavor---guayaba. It was a great afternoon!

Yesterday was clinic in Chutzerob I. It was Kemmel's first time there, and possibly the first time we didn't get the truck stuck in the mud. (Because it didn't rain--or possibly Kemmel's finese with the 4-wheel drive). We had a busy day and saw lots of new patients, plenty of which were of traditional Mayan religion. Lots of anxiety issues and widowed/abandoned women. But we worked with some brothers in that church who are so good to give counsel and consolation and prayer, and seem to really enjoy the work of the clinic.

Tomorrow we enjoy fellowshiping with about 1500 people at the conference in Mactzul--should be great!

Pomp and Circumstance

Today was graduation day for 4 high school kids from the churches we work with. Three of the them were recipients of the Sherman scholarship that Health Talents offers. The really neat thing is, one guy, Nelson Riquiac was the first one in his church to graduate from high school! Way to go, brother. Tomas Chan (son of our health promoter Gaspar Chan) also graduated--only the second one to do so from his town. The other two were Cesar Daniel and Gladys Quino--brother and sister from Chuchipaca. We are so proud of them and their families for encouraging them and supporting them. It is so rare to meet someone from around here who has finished junior high, much less high school. And now more and more families are talking about pushing their children to study.

Cesar Daniel and Gladys Quino

Nelson Riquiac with parents Juan and Tomasa and us.

Tomas Chan with parents Gaspar and Juana and brother Josue

Here's a big thank you to all of you who contribute to the scholarship programs and to the ABC program that give children the opportunity to be educated. It is

a blessing that we Americans sometimes can't fully appreciate, but these families were so grateful for the help and always ask us to thank the contributors on their behalf.

Xpe ri jap (It's gonna rain).....Again

It is still raining!!!!! We went to bed last night to the sound of rain on the tin roof and woke up to the same thing. Thankfully the roads out to Chuchipaca are very rocky and we didn't have any trouble with mud. We had a few patients today willing to brave the wet and cold--the special of the day was watery eyes and cataracts and high blood pressure. I'm sure the watery eyes are a by-product of staying inside close to the kitchen fire to stay warm.



After clinic, we did a home visit for an elderly blind lady down the road from the church. We found her and the rest of the family hanging out in the kitchen around the fire waiting for the chicken soup and tamalitos to finish cooking. (It smelled pretty good.) When Gaspar asked her how old she was, she said, " I don't even know anymore--maybe 90." Her family laughed and said they didn't know either. We got her treated for some gastritis problems and an infected wound on her leg. After we prayed for her she reached out her hand to pat each of us and thanked us for coming. We wound our way back home and decided to enjoy a late lunch together with Gaspar and Juan back in Chichi. Now we are warming ourselves by a toasty fire at home and, you guessed it.........listening to the RAIN! Tomorrow is Sunday and hopefully a full of sun.



Have a nice Lord's Day tomorrow!

Parka Weather

It's been really cold today with 24 hours of constant rain from Tropical Depression 16 hanging over us (Thanks for the email updates, brother Charles Campbell). Everyone came to clinic shivering today and totally bundled up, which is really funny to think about when its only about 53 degrees outside!

Here's a couple of good-lookin' Guatemalans with plenty of layers on.
Anyway, today we saw a fair number of patients for a rainy day here at Clinica Caris. The theme of the day was anxiety and insomnia. Two of my patients related having left the church for various reasons and both were looking to reconcile themselves back to God and the church. We spent time talking about having faith in God even when we can't imagine things turning out well, and asking God to help us trust him when our faith is weak. Both men were optomistic at the end of the visit and we prayed together for their spiritual strengthening.

My last patient of the day was Josefa, a sister from one of our clinic congregations who was operated on for a prolapsed uterus last week. She and her husband said they were both so appreciative for the help, and she was feeling much better. Her husband said he wanted to thank us because he always hurt to see his wife suffering like that for so many years, and now he feels as relieved as she does. So thanks to all of our Gyns last week who worked hard to help her.

Kemmel and Josefina and Tomas headed out to Xatinap today--mud central! They got to haul clinic supplies in across the muddy path and in the rain. But on the up side, they saw a lady alcoholic patient who came back and told Josefina she had quit drinking for two months now. She was doing much better and just wanted to let her know.

To top off the day, we got to enjoy an earthquake after lunch that lasted about a minute and a half. We found out it's center was on the Mexico-Guatemala border measuring 6.5, but thankfully no major damage.

Back to Work

We arrived back in Guatemala City on last Friday night and got to meet up with the incoming surgical team on Saturday. We made it to Montellano (where it's hot!) that evening and enjoyed seeing several friends from previous trips. We even got the meet the mother (Carol Fitzgerald) of some friends of ours from our Amarillo days--Jill and Michael Voss. It was good to catch up on their lives even if it was second hand.

Our surgery week was busy with gynecology and general surgery patients. We had a good turn out and no complications, thankfully. We were talking about how patients alway have such nice things to say and Rosario had mentioned that one patient told her that while standing at the gate waiting for his name to be called on the list so he could enter the beautiful grounds of the hospital, he thought heaven would be very much the same with children of God waiting to hear our names to enter paradise. That made everyone feel really good about the work being done.

Today we are back in Chichicastenango--YEA! It's always so good to be back. We headed out to Paxot II and had a good clinic day seeing several of our good friends out there. They are such a warm and hospitable crowd--they made us feel very welcome again. One of the young women from Paxot came in with her mother-in-law because she wanted a pregnancy test. This was a nervous moment for her because they have been married 4 years and have only had one child who died and one miscarriage. When we gave them the positive result everyone, including me and Mauri, our health promoter were crying for joy for her. Please pray that she is able to carry to term and keep this child who means so much to them.

Tonight we work on getting the rest of our bags unpacked and this house back to normal.
Good night and God bless

Anybody out there?

Okay, we are still alive. Just been travelling in the States, seeing family and enjoying some vacation time. It's been a great few weeks and we will have some photos to share when we get back. We are also enjoying getting to see election/political news real-time thanks to a little FoxNews. We don't have t.v. at home, so we usually get our news from the internet--effective, but not as entertaining!

We are working on our absentee ballots (Vote early and vote often!). It was kind of hard to figure it all out, but finally got our applications done and even an "emergency backup" Federal Absentee Write-in Ballot printed to mail in, in case our official ballots don't make it down south! We should get an A on our citizenship grade this 6 weeks!

Well, have a great weekend everyone. We get back to Guatemala tomorrow.
God bless.