15 January, 2009

 

After an eventful U.S. and European vacation, we are now here in Guatemala.  I will put up pictures of our adventures as time allows. 

 

We arrived in Guatemala on Monday after a quick visit to Mexico City to say goodbye, unpack, and repack.  We spent the night in Antigua, which is a tourist town near Guatemala City and then traveled the winding mountain roads to Santa Cruz del Quiche where we now reside.

 

We hit the ground running with our first clinic on Wednesday in Nueva Santa Catarina-a small village about a 2 ½ drive from our residence.  Well, maybe it won't always take this long, but it was my first day on the mountain roads with the truck.  This clinic is held in a small church building and we brought everything that we used for the clinic with us.  Thankfully we were accompanied by another missionary couple who had covered this clinic during the gap before our arrival.  They helped getting us rolling. 

 

The clinic today was held at a ministry called ASELSI, which is only a half-hour away.  They have a wonderful building which houses a school, the clinic, and other programs.  They are very organized and blessed with a full range of medicines and resources.  Exam rooms and procedures are very similar to a clinic in the United States.    

 

I will upload some pictures when I get them organized. 

 

Since we have arrived, we have been very busy and this is the first chance I have gotten to get on the internet.  We are thankful to have a more relaxed schedule over the next couple of days. 

 

Please pray for us during this transition period.  Specifically, we are seeking a local church which we can call home and direction as to the ministry that God has for Areli here in Guatemala.  Thank you for your support and we will keep you informed with updates, prayer requests, pictures, and videos.

 

I would also like to include in these updates some medical stuff-that is to say a general idea of what types of conditions we treat and specific interesting cases.  I will try to use non-medical or basic-level medical descriptions.  I realized that I am speaking to a large audience and this may be boring for some.  Therefore, I will typically include these at the end of the updates.  So if you're not interested, you can just stop reading here.

 

The clinic in Nueva Santa Cartarina was primarily made up of chronic medical patients.  I treated mostly diabetes, high blood pressure, and many cases of seizures.  It is interesting that so many people are being treated for seizure disorders.  Of course, likely none of them have had an EEG to assess them for seizures.  And I question if some of them only think they have seizures or for some reason want to be treated for seizures.  Others were more convincing a including a young girl who had a large burn on her right forearm from falling into a fire during a seizure.

 

At ASELSI, I saw no chronic patients primarily because they scheduled me to see the patients with acute needs.  There were quite a variety of respiratory infections, gastrointestinal infections, and headaches.  I also had an interesting case of a 7 year old boy who had suffered a stroke or bleed in his brain leaving him with right-sided weakness.  This happened about a year ago.  I have no idea what caused his problem.  His mother denied any head injury.  She said it just happened one day when he was sitting at school.  I suspect it may have been cause by a genetic abnormality in the blood vessels in his brain.  Thankfully, ASELSI actually has a physical therapy program and can hopefully help him recover some strength.