Mobile Medical Brigade with Memorial Road Church of Christ

We have a great group of friends in the Memorial Road Church of Christ!  Every year this group along with some faithful extras from Texas and Tennessee and Georgia come down to work with us and visit.  This year we changed up their schedule from November to September and they were so flexible!  Our goal was to get most of our ABC kids through their well child checkups to finish the year and we were very successful.  Also we had several scholarship kids and applicants come by for their board member interviews with Mike Duncan and Dr. Robert Lamb.
Here are some photos from the week.  Thanks to Susan Mellor for putting together all the team pics! And check out Sheri's blog for more  www.sheriinguate.blogspot.com

Jordan waitin' in line with the kiddos

Babystter's club

Terry, Tomas and Enrique pondering how we will get everything in the trucks.

Dr. Haller and Julie ready to roll!

Dave and Jaime hauling the mobile dental compressor

4-wheelin' for Jesus!

Alyx showing off her professional skills

Jessica, Dave, Susan, Lisa, Barb, Dr. Haller, and Donna--up and at 'em early!

"Hey, if we have to have clean hands, we might as well have fun!"

Our star team!

Yummy!  They know gringos will eat fried chicken!   Dr. Mike Kelly:  I hadn't had fried chicken in years, and now I've had it 4 times in the last 3 days!

Mike Duncan--pharmacist extrordanaire!

Gettin' Ready

This month is flying by as we get ready for our visiting mobile medical/dental team and look forward to heading to the States to visit supporting congregations and to Chile to visit Kemmel's dad.  These last couple of days we've also been meeting with our director Rick Harper to make plans for 2015 and review our operations in general. Please be praying for us at Health Talents to be good stewards of what God has given us and to reflect God's love as we serve.

Our team coming down will be helping us do well child check ups on the ABC kids.  We offer two checkups a year in this program to help monitor nutrition and growth and also get a chance to give some health education to the families.  We'll pick up our team today and head on up to Chichicastenango, starting clinics tomorrow.  There will be 4 teams going out on Thursday--that's a lot of meds and equipment to prepare--but our staff has been working hard to get ready!

We are also excited to host Dr. Mike and Julie Kelly this month.  They were missionaries here in Guatemala when Kemmel and I came down as MET mission interns in 1990!  I must say, we all really looked up to them and now feel so honored to work with them this week.  Dr. Kelly will be covering my clinics in October while we go to the States.

So this morning, we are relaxing a little--Kemmel taking advantage of a swim in the olympic-sized pool down in Zone 4 here in Guatemala City, and I sipping coffee and cruising the web.  Then it's off to pick up ice, drinks, lunch and the team!  We'll post some pics later this week.

Men's and Ladies' Seminars

A couple of times a year we get the honor of co-hosting Bible seminars for the leaders of the area churches.  This time we enjoyed the teaching of Alexander and Silvia Castellanos from El Salvador.  They are also the parents of our Dra. Sara Castellanos, so it's been extra special.  They taught on James for the men and Esther for the women. Thank you Brentwood Hills Church of Christ and Paxot II Iglesia de Cristo for your faithful support of this work.  Everyone enjoyed the time of fellowship and spiritual growth.

Silvia, Alexander and Sara Castellanos in Paxot II

The brothers selected by their churches to attend the seminar.

The area's women in leadership.  There were several young ladies this time which is always encouraging.

Cervical Cancer Screening

Tomorrow we begin our first mobile cervical cancer screening event. Cervical cancer is the most common cancer in women in Guatemala and the cancer hospital here is overwhelmed with advanced cases--and those are just the patients that can afford cancer care.  Just in the last 3 months we have had two patients pass away from cervical cancer--younger than 55 years old.

 Dr. Sara Castellanos and I and our two female health promoters, Maury and Cesy will head out to Mactzul II where we will be hosted by the church for the event, while Sheri covers our regularly-scheduled clinic.  We've invited all the women from the town to come for their VIAA (Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid)--the new screening technique that allows us to tell the patient immediately if there is cancer or pre-cancerous lesions or not.
This is a perfect example of appropriate technology, as we eliminate the need for costly lab, prolonged wait for results, and it reduces the number of patients lost to followup.  We were also generously given a cryotherapy gun for treating pre-cancerous lesions.

So we are thankful to God and to our supporters for helping us offer these services that help protect moms and families and hopefully avoid this all too common cancer.