Surgery Teams
We have agonized over not being able to have surgical teams and are working diligently to get our hospital licensing where it needs to be to go forward. The pace is terribly slow, but we see progress and are trusting God to lead us in this. There are updates and new construction and new requirements and newly enforced details that have made things difficult for us. We hope to be able to get through these hoops and start bringing our surgical teams back to work with us!
Mobile Medical and Dental Teams
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| ABC kids from the Chijtinimit church. |
Because of continued high numbers of Covid cases in the country, we have limited our U.S. teams to maintenance crews and dental care for our ABC sponsorship kids. This allows us to schedule patients in the communities and limit the number of people hanging out together before and after appointments. It has gone well, and we have been able to attend the majority of our ABC kids focusing on restorative care (fillings, sealants) and preventive work, rather than just extracting teeth. We feel blessed to have been able to attend so many of the kids already.
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| Making progress on the dental front! |
Our maintenance team came from our home congregation of Eastside Church of Christ and really knocked out some hospital honey-do's! One of the industrial security requirements for our hospital license involves placement of smoke alarms, emergency lighting, large fire extinguishers and safety signage.
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| Emergency lighting and smoke alarms--30 each around the hospital. |
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| One of the 300 "What to do and not do" signs. |
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| One of the 30 fire extinguishers mounted. |
Having small teams also gave us a chance to test run the Covid protocols that we have in place for visitors. One of the things that gives us pause is what to do with a team member that tests positive (or gets sick) during their stay here--causing them to have to stay and isolate and retest negative a before being allowed to board a plane back to the U.S.A. We have had one team member in this situation and thankfully, other than having to stay over longer, not being able to check into a hotel or Airbnb in Guatemala City, and the cost of double checking his Covid test and retesting at the end of his isolation, he didn't have any significant complications. This allowed us to re-evaluate our protocols and prepare for future incidents.
Outpatient clinics
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| Some of our staff visiting our sister Antonia as she mourned the death of both of her parents. |
Our Guatemalan staff continue to work full time in our primary care clinics in the Highlands and the Coastal area. We have our central clinics Ezell and Caris open daily and have been able to incorporate several communities into our mobile clinic rounds.
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| Mobile clinic team in Chuchipaca. |
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| Women's Health Training seminar with Faith in Practice. |
We even hosted a Women's Health Training week at Clinica Ezell for our doctors and nurses, providing free cervical cancer screening to over 250 women in the immediate area. The conference and was led by our friends at Faith in Practice--Dra. Patty Baiza and Dr. Jorge Mendez. They allowed us to pick their brains and review the principles of cervical cancer and precancerous lesion detection. It was a great blessing to our staff and patients.
Covid--The Collateral Damage
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| A familiar sight around here lately--funeral procession. |
We continue to have very high numbers of cases and hospitalizations, causing our national hospitals to collapse. We have so many patients waiting to have elective surgery, and the national hospitals will not take non-emergent cases. We get calls from cancer or trauma patients needing additional services but can't get admitted or transferred to higher level centers due to lack of bed space. It is getting hard to purchase common medications due to importation issues, supply/demand, price increases.
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| ABC kids from the Las Trampas church. |
Kids have been doing virtual schooling the entire time. Most of our rural kids have very little access to internet, so homework lessons are assigned once a week or via messaging, and parents take the work up to school for grading. There will be no senior level testing to close out their high school education and no graduations allowed. Just endless holding...and worrying about the future.
Something New
It's really hard to see the good that can come of difficult situations, trials, and persecutions.When we are in the moment all we can comprehend is the crisis, the pain and potential consequences to come. We are all living in difficult times right now, be it the pandemic, job insecurity, economic downturn, intercultural strife, political turmoil, struggling marriages, health crises, etc. What good could possibly come from the trials we have, the failures and delays and disappointments?
If we look at Isaiah 43, God works in all of these situations. He makes a way in impossible situations; he sees solutions that we can't fathom; he uses our weaknesses and failures and enemies to achieve his good end. This year has been hard because of continued limitations from the pandemic, the changes in governmental regulations and constant illness and death around us, but God in in it with us. He sees what we don't see and has plans for our future. Let's trust him and be ready to join in.
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