We had a great couple of weeks of visiting with family and friends here on the mission field. Our first team was from the Church of Christ in Hennessey, Oklahoma and included my sister Anna and her husband Charlie and niece Allie. What a great group of Okies! They did some clinical work, some veterinary consult visits and planted around 3000 vetiver grass plants.
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| We both lack the ability to smile and keep our eye open! |
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| Kemmel escaped the picture! |
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| Sheri with Emma who is a recently graduated pharmacist and helped run pharmacy here and even went on some cattle visits during the week. |
Each week started off with worship with our church family in Chijtinimit. We had some baptisms while the Hennessey group was here and visited the church with Quinton, Ann and Sara.
Cristina getting baptized
Chijtinimit Church Family
Clinic - Sorry no pics!
Clinics with our Hennessey were our regularly scheduled medical and dental consults with some added in ABC kid checkups. We were honored to have my sister Anna working dental clinic, and Sandy (Anna's mother-in-law) and Jayme and Vanessa in assistant mode. Emma jumped into pharmacy to show off her new pharmacy degree! Great work guys and thanks for all the pill counting as well!
Erosion control project
Our brother-in-law Charlie headed up the team of Allie, Addie and Hudson to plant 3000 vetitver plants around several test communities with high risk areas for land slides and erosion. Several of our coworkers and church members from different communities that have offered to let us use parts of their land to grow and later propagate vetiver grass for soil erosion control projects. We need these test plots to be able to show other people the benefits of the grass and to also be able to divide off the plants when they are big enough to share with others. So we put this team to work and they did a great job.
Difficult to see but this is looking down the hill from Tomas's house where the lost about 15-20 meters of dirt a few years back with the rains. Hopefully we will just have normal rains for a year or 2 to get this part set up.
Did not get pics of the group, but you can see how dirty Tomas is which means the groups was dirtier. :) Too much squating!
At the Mactzul V church where they was a landfill prior to the building of the church. Planted grass to help the ridge. Probably planted 100-200 plants around this area.
This is below the latrine at the Chijtinimit church. Do not want this one to break open with a mud slide!
Veterinary Consults - sorry no pics but quite the adventure especially watching Sandy and Ed grab those animals!
This always fascinates us and the Guatemalan families! Dr. Ed and Sandy were real troopers and tirelessly went out to see livestock and answer questions and vaccinate. Kemmel and one of our health promotors, Enrique spent the week with them soaking up info and learning how to wrangle sheep and cattle!
Cardiology Clinic - always great having Quinton and Ann around!
Dra. Sara and Sheri and I have been collecting patients with heart murmurs and questionable cardiac histories. Since there are no local services for cardiology consults and patients have to travel to Guatemala City 3-4 hrs. away and pay about a week's salary for an echocardiogram, we try not refer patients unless they are truly symptomatic. So we were so excited to be able to have Dr. Dickerson and local missionary Sally York (a real live echocardiogram tech) with us to evaluate our patients. We not only saved several patients from unnecessary travel and cost, we confirmed that two patients would need further workup. Also, we got to practice our cardiac exam with a cardiologist pointing out what he heard and helping us pick up subtle sounds. It was a great day and we are so grateful for the time that the Dickersons and Sally gave us.
