Today we went to a local Baptist church, Iglesia Bautista
Biblica Betel, and set up a clinic for this church family and their
guests. Before we left the hotel,
however, I walked around the outside to see the plants and vegetation. There were two trees with fruit of some kind,
so I took pictures and then went inside to ask the staff what they were called.
The one was yellow, and it looked like it had been cut in half before it finished
growing. The trunk of that tree had
thorny spikes all over it. The staff
told me this fruit was called ‘corona de Cristo’, the crown of Christ. I call it fruit for lack of a better term,
but they said it was inedible. The other
fruit they called ‘nuney’ fruit – of course, I haven’t a clue if I’m spelling
that right or not. This fruit is said to
help with arthritis and rashes. If
that’s the case they need to be making a lot of nuney cream for all the rashes
we saw! I’m not really sure how to describe
this fruit, other than it was green, about the size of a mango, and it had
black dots all over it. Not anything
like I’ve ever seen.
It always amazes me how we can turn the oddest of locations
into a clinic. The church sanctuary was
very adequate for triage and evangelism, and three of the four classrooms were
well lit and adequate for provider areas and the pharmacy, but one room posed a
challenge to make it useful. There was
only one light bulb hanging from the center of the room and no windows, but it
had a sink and toilet – obviously a great place to have the lab and procedure
area since most of our lab is collecting urine samples, and most of our
procedures involve washing out ears. We
could see that outside the wall of the room was another wall on which there
were more lights, so I thought I’d climb up on a chair to see if I could reach
those lights. As I said, it was kind of
dark in there, and my eyes hadn’t quite adjusted, so I just about fell off the
wall and the chair when a dog came lunging at me barking his fool head
off! Good night, I thought I would have
a heart attack! I must have looked like
that was going through my head, too, because everyone got a good laugh out of
that. At that point, Charity said she
could work with things just as they were, and I went to set up my station. We were supposed to stay at the church all
day, but by the afternoon it was evident we had seen everyone that intended to
come – only 46. But, PTL, eight of these
made professions of faith!
After the clinic we ate lunch at McDonald’s – really not
something I would do in the States if given a choice – but I have to say it
wasn’t bad. I think for Ashley it was a
relief to eat something familiar. Ashley helped me figure out that I had
downloaded the wrong Skype app for my phone, so once I got the right app I was
able to call back to the States for just two cents a minute via internet vs. my
phone service provider. Yippee! That’s a lot of help for budget minded people
J
We finished counting meds, and thankfully our trunk of meds that had been left
in Ohio caught up with us.
Bed time ~ 11pm. Have
I mentioned that I prefer to go to bed early??
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