We kicked off the normal clinics on Monday at Clinica Caris with the team of Dr. Josefina which also includes Manuel and Tomas, and the dental team - Dr. Marcos, Mauri and new employee Aura. With the new year Mauri will be changing her role to be an overall assistant in the office - meaning helping with reporting, inventories, cleaning, substitute dental assistant, health promoter, etc. She has a career degree in bookkeeping and brings with her computer skills as well, so we are very excited to have some of these new skills on board. Aura comes from a community where we hold clinics, Pacaja Xesic, and she is interested in starting dental school in 2009, so we thought this would be a good opportunity to give her a head start. The only downside is we will have to re-train someone again at the end of year. (we will have a picture of Aura soon).
Dr. Josefina's team - the more serious look.
After saying "wiskil". Always gets a smile.
The year started with a larger clinic than expected - 17 medical patients and 8 dental patients (we only saw dental patients in the afternoon as the morning started with training Aura - she is catching on quickly). In our patient mix we had a return visit from Miguel who was a double cleft lip patient - he will be returning for surgery on his palette in February and also another cleft lip patient who will present in February as well. Sorry no pictures yet. We had a return on some of the regulars and a number of new patients and some referrals that came from our Saturday clinic in Mactzul 5. We have one patient with a prolapsed uterus who is pretty scared of surgery, so please pray for her. Marcos had a patient from Xejox, about 2 hours away and the site of one of our once a month clinics in 2008. We are excited to be able to serve this area as they are far away from everyone and do not have any health services in their area.
Praise God that we had no vandalism during our absence. Our neighbors helped keep an eye on the clinic. They actually have a couple of dogs who make there way to the clinic every night to help guard it. Pretty interesting huh?! They learned during construction to go there as one of our neighbors sons was staying and guarding the construction site. They continue to provide the service - free of charge. :)
Sheri's team, including Gaspar and Juan started clinics today as they will now be on a Tuesday - Saturday schedule as we used to have. They started off with a combined medical and dental clinic in Pacaja Xesic. Marcos is being a trooper with the mobile dental clinics. We have planned half time mobile and half time at Caris, but mobile dental is much more complicated but we are willing to due the "lucha" (make the effort) as it enables us to take the ministry to the communities in need.
Also, today we started back on our education schedule with Josefina's team having a few hours of training on emergencies and when to head for the dreaded hospital. They had a good session with questions. Sheri's team will continue with the education next week and at the end of the month we have a day for all of the volunteer promoters as well. So over a month we will have 3 days focused on training, one each for each team (just FT employees) and then one for everyone.
It is good to be back on a schedule and even more so to be back working in the communities. Now with the assistance of Mauri, I, Kemmel should be able to spend more time visiting the communities on a regular basis as well.
During a walk today we ran across a procession honoring the "black Christ" which is always a reminder of how much we need to bring people back to the real Lord of our lives.
OK, I know this is getting long but one funny story. On Friday we were at Mactzul 5 and we always get the "oh by the way" question. Well this one came from one of the health promoters and his wife who have had 7 children. The question was about having a surgical procedure to prevent pregnancy. So as we were talking mostly about the wife having the procedure, we looked at the promoter and indicated that he could go for the procedure as well and spare his wife since she has already had all of the children. The look on her face was priceless! She started giggling, pointing at him and winking - if you know the people here, you know that just does not happen! So this is a "you had to be there story", but we got a kick out of seeing a married couple toying with each other as it helps you realize the love they share even though they are normally more stoic.
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