This was certainly a day of ups and downs! The clinic where we are to work this week is
about 30 minutes down the road, past the Chiquita Banana plantations. It’s interesting to see the bananas being
conveyed from the farms to the processing area.
The conveyor belts run alongside the road, and it’s all motorized. The
stalks of bananas (still pretty green) are suspended from hooks and brought to
an area where they are broken off the stalk and placed in washbasins. We didn’t get to see what happens after the
washbasins, so I’m not sure what else is done to them, but they told us they
find lots of tarantulas among the bunches of bananas. Yuck!
So today, we arrived at the clinic only to find that the
clinic is already occupied with workers and patients. At first we tried to set up in this facility
but realized quickly that this wasn’t going to work – two separate teams trying
to see patients in the same space; one team charging a fee and the other team
not. Evidently the expectation was that the clinic would not be operational
this week, as in the regular staff had the week off and we could use the
facility. Obviously a mix up somewhere,
but as Bradley tells us ahead of time – be fluid; flexible is too rigid. So, after the great excitement of thinking
that we were going to work in actual exam rooms with air conditioning came the
great let down that we were going to be working under a corrugated steel roof
with a cement floor – and that’s it.
There was a stage type area with a wall, but otherwise it was totally
open. And the wall, unfortunately, was
being used as a public urinal, which made for some strong odors in that heat
and humidity. Sorry if that grosses some
of you out – not the intention at all, but it is reality.
I’m not in on the ‘what do we do next’ talks, but the next
thing I saw was that people were arriving with chairs, and specifically, real
furniture like a couch and upholstered chairs.
We had met a lady last night at the hotel, and I didn’t have a clue who
she was or why she was meeting us, but it turns out she is a pastor’s
wife. Her name is Mariela (that’s a
phonetic spelling), and she was raised in Changuinola. I don’t know how she got saved, but for the
last 14 years she has been praying that the Lord would provide for a church to
be started here. In her eyes we were a
part of the answer to her prayers. The
other part came three months ago when the Lord brought Juan Robles and his
family here as missionaries. From what I
understood, Pastor Robles is a Mexican national that somehow got to Oakland, CA
as a kid. He got involved in the gangs,
with all the tattoos to show it, and did something that landed him in prison
for 2.5 years. When he got out he was
deported back to Mexico and stripped of his US citizenship, but somewhere in
there the Lord opened his eyes to the gospel.
After getting saved he attended a Bible institute in Mexico, and the Lord
called him as a missionary to Panama. I
was very impressed at his humility and yet his boldness in witnessing. Mariela’s prayer was that the Lord would use
us to bring contacts for Pastor Robles to follow up and build the church. That’s our prayer, too! Mariela’s husband pastors a church in the
mountains of Costa Rica, the border being about 20 minutes from our hotel. He was gone all week at meetings at his
church, so we didn’t get to meet him, but Mariela labored with us, acting as
soul winner and children’s worker. It
was from her house that most of the furniture came.
Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying, but many of the
patients we saw had infectious skin diseases that, generally speaking, are a
result of poor hygiene. Many were coming
from the surrounding mountains – indigenous folks from the Nobe Indian people
group. As in all cultures, there is type
casting, and these folks are reputed as being lazy and ungrateful, yet Mariela
showed absolutely no disdain for these patients. I was incredibly humbled and honored to be in
the presence of this woman that would offer her own furniture for clinic use. She was absolutely thrilled each day to see
this all coming to fruition.
We needed more seating areas, so we pulled the seats out of one
of the vans to use as provider benches, then parked the vans near the ‘stage’
where we could use this space for the pharmacy.
A couple of tables appeared and then patients started drifting in. Voila – a clinic!
It was obvious that this was a very needy area. We saw some of the sickest kids I’ve seen on
any of these trips so far. I heard that
a 26 day old baby was sent to the local hospital in respiratory distress, and I
know I saw two children of whom I was convinced that they had pneumonia (at
least as convinced as can be without a chest x-ray). We provided them with oral antibiotics, but
until we were able to find some 110 electrical current, we weren’t able to use
our nebulizer machine. I could only pray
their moms would bring them back for rechecks later in the week. The church in David sent some of their
members down for the week to act as soul winners, and it was a joy to see their
fervor. I believe we saw about 300 patients that first day, not sure how many
were saved. Great team spirit – I don’t
remember hearing one complaint!
We closed up shop around 5 pm, went back to the hotel to
take showers and then had Chinese for dinner.
Never thought about having Chinese food in Central America, but I
remember having it in Uganda several years ago and found it to be delicious!
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