It is still raining!

We are on the third day of rain. Started Wednesday afternoon, rained all day thursday and all day today. Of course this always happens when we tell people it does not rain much here in Chichi! According to the weather service may rain for another 2 days. Last time this happened with Hurricaine Stan the country suffered from flash floods and mud slides.

We had a good day today (pretty much all days are good days!). We held 3 clinics today. Sheri had clinic in Paxot 2 where she is also living for the next 4 weeks, stepping deep into the rural life and trying to learn some more kiche. She had over 30 patients today which is very abnormal for there but we had a draw by offering a small health fair providing free blood glucose checks. Sheri was joined by 3 of the MET students as well. Poor Gaspar had to walk home to Xepocol because the roads are pretty bad and no trucks were making the trip. Manuel returned with news that he had some difficulty in the 4x4 so everyone was probably too nervous to drive the roads, especially downhill. So that left Gaspar with walking back to Xepocol, probably about 2 hours in the rain!

Lisa and I headed to Clinica Caris for a women's health / pap clinic and were joined by some old friends of our family when we lived in Guatemala in the 1980's. We were joined by Rachel Vasey (this was Rachel's first visit back to Guatemala after many years) and Amy Kendrick (Vasey) and also the wife of Nate Vasey, Becky and another nursing student which we must admit we cannot remember her name. We have been trying to advertise for a couple of weeks and had a good turn out of 19 patients. We are trying to promote the importance of pap smears to the ladies of the area and we have another clinic tomorrow at Clinica Caris with Lisa and Josefina. As we had ladies clinic we had the oppurtunity to demonstrate a smokeless stove we are promoting that reduces the consumption of firewood. None sold today but many interested in thinking about it. We did have one lady purchase a water filter from the same agency we get the stoves from.

Josefina and Marcos, and 3 MET students headed out to La Estancia outside of Santa Cruz for another clinic where we also had a good turn out of patients.

Here is a picture of the smokeless stove we are promoting. The stove is a creation on HELPS International. We are short on space so we found some room in the pump house of our water cistern. Not much room inside but it works for demonstrations. The ladies made coffee and heated up tortillas for lunch today. Coffee was much appreciated as it has also been pretty cold with the rain.