Raining on Our Parade

Enjoying the cool of the rainy season here at Clinica Ezell

We have been living the Pandemic life here in Guatemala like everyone else around the world. The thing that is striking is how everyone around the world regardless of social status is facing the same situation right now: health concerns, financial crises, delays in plans, relationship strain, political unrest, uncertainty about the future, and on and on. It brings to mind how we are all equal in the eyes of God. He is no respecter of persons and gives us all the freedom to choose to obey him or not. But He expects us all to answer to him ultimately.

So aside from the theological lessons we are getting from this year's experiences, we are learning how to function as a Non Profit Organization in a foreign country, while trying to stay abreast of the legal changes, employment regulations, health requirements and decrease in revenue sources and having less access to Government offices due to restricted hours.

Recently we tried to start having appointment-based clinics with triage of patients for better control of Covid risk. Our normal walk-in clinic way of operating isn't going to cut it anymore. We had a pretty decent system going and were ready to try to replicate it in both Clinica Ezell and Clinica Caris.

Triage at the entry to the property. 

The truth comes out...many people don't want to admit to Covid symptoms until they are in the consult room.

Then, one of our staff got sick and tested positive for Covid-19 (from a family contact). Unfortunately, under the regulations at the time the government considered all coworkers as "close contacts," and 11 of us were put in quarantine for two weeks. This included two of us physicians, a dentist and several support staff. Not only that, they didn't count our quarantine start date until the health department representative for our case called to set it up--a week later. Then another coworker got sick (a separate group of workers not exposed to the first one), so 8 more people were put in quarantine including another dentist. So we have pretty much put a break on the clinical duties until we can get everyone back to work.

Quarantine time.

Meanwhile, due to new restrictions our already limited transportation options were reduced again when the government made is so vehicles could only travel on even or odd days depending on license plate numbers. For now we have only a few workers who can still come in to work, so we just shuffle trucks each day.

On a good note, the latest news bulletin from the Health Department has updated their definition of "close contacts" to something more manageable in the workplace, outside of patient care. So we are going back to the drawing board and meanwhile ramping up our telemedicine program with all of our physicians and extending it to include ABC well child checkups. We will also incorporate our dental staff and health promoter staff to do patient education through video chat with families. We were able to visit all of the ABC communities to get out an extra food delivery of corn, beans and other staples.

It's fun to get pictures and videos from our patients in telemedicine. They tell us they miss us and can't wait to come back in person.

Getting out the food packages to our ABC families.

As of yesterday, we've been told that Guatemala has effectively flattened our curve, but that the peak is now projected to occur in late September or October. Then the slow decline to manageable numbers. We keep praying for this to end and to get back to the way things were before. In the meantime we will keep coming up with new ways to work and minister here. We appreciate your prayers.