MONDAY: TO WORK
| One of the first patients. |
| Arriving Monday morning. |
| Dump truck tries to help. |
| In the clinic's waiting room. |
The dental corner. |
| Don translating in the farmacia. |
| Max listens. |
| Single father, Peter, with his baby (see tomorrow's update) |
| Setting up the clinic. |
| Setting up the farmacia . |
| The team walks to catch the bus to the clinic. |
| It's really stuck! |
Today we learned about service. It was not just a day to help someone, to try to fix someone, but rather to serve…..service without preconditions, service without expecting any payback, service via love and caring. Manuel and Miriam are our new friends here today. They absolutely ooze love and service as they go about their day. Our host missionary Don Wolfram has worked closely with Manuel and Miriam over the past couple years, including sharing the leadership of several “Encounter With God” weekends. Manuel is a Family Counselor as well as a pastor, and Miriam is a dynamic Christian leader, a woman with unending compassion. These characteristics and attitudes served our team very well today. Manuel and Miriam have a vision and a dream to start a new church here in Centro Yuu, to minister to the poorest of this Shuar tribe, and they took their vacation from their regular jobs to be with us this week and to work with these people. Although the Shuar are no longer the “headshrinkers of the Amazon”, they are living in poverty, and, depending on how far off the main road and into the jungle they live, they suffer from lack of appropriate medical and dental care. We got up early this Monday morning, as we knew we had a lot of work to do before we could see our first patient. Because our bus was sunk into the soccer field clay, all of our equipment and supplies were still there, and we had been unable to sort through and organize it last evening, which had been our plan. We arrived on a public bus we caught out along the road by our hotel, and we trudged with our overnight bags up to Centro Yuu. Our bus driver had spent the night on the stuck bus, and he met us (he appeared to be happy to see us after the long, dark, rainy night). The good news was that the bus was stuck only about 50 yards from the door of the Centro Yuu Community House. The team went to work. The bags of equipment and supplies were all carried in, sorted through, and organized. The medicines were sat out on the one and only table we had, and a couple school chair-desks were carried in from the small community school across the soccer field. A piece of plywood lying across 2 chairs would serve as Bob Hammond’s dental instrument table and sterilization location. The local people were already lining up outside, but it took us about an hour to get things ready to go. Bob and Barbara Hammond opened, unfolded, and set up the entire dental “office” in the one back corner, and the medical “office” was established behind a curtain hanging on a rope in the other back corner. Martin carried and pulled and tied the rope and smiled; he had officially recovered and was back to normal. Mackenzie talked to some kids and sorted through medicines. Brenda set up a chair-desk at the entrance and readied to begin the triage and registration process (much simpler here than it is back home). Cheryl and Yvonne set up the entire farmacia table and were ready to deliver the medicines. Max helped with the drugs and carried bags and gave everyone a spark of energy. Kate pulled out all of the glasses and began cleaning them and preparing to set up our glasses and sunglasses station. Janet organized and prepared the gift station, with all the hats and T-shirts and lotions and soaps and shampoos. Bob Bernhard volunteered to be the dental office helper, organizer, sterilizer, and all-around dental gopher. Arlen directed and set up the medical “office”. Jennifer recorded some of the activity, pulled open some supply bags, and kept one eye on the hubbub of activity going on around the stuck bus. Bob and Barbara unfolded and set up an entire dental office out of 4 boxes and a dental chair crate, much as they have done before in various jungles and faraway places. Speaking of the stuck bus, our driver Andres and about 30 local folks worked and worked and worked to set it free. They pushed and pulled and dug. A dump truck arrived, and they broke a few ropes and chains trying to pull the bus. They finally found a strong chain, and hooked it to the left rear wheel. Using the truck’s dump bed as a fulcrum, they were able to pull that left rear wheel up out of the hole it had been in for 18 hours and to drag the other side over. Repositioning to the front again, the ole bus lurched a little further forward each time the truck pulled. Finally, after hours of sweat and trying, and with a dozen locals pushing on the back of the bus, the dump truck dragged the front wheels up out of their holes and toward the edge of the soccer field. Cheers went up from all around as the bus gained momentum and cleared the edge up onto the rock road. We were working in the windowless Community House, but, when we heard the cheers, we knew what it meant. Our bus was free. The team heard the cheers from outside as we continued our work. Lots of sighs of relief and many smiles followed. The work inside continued, with many painful teeth being extracted, and many people with backaches and parasites and coughs and rashes receiving medicines and caring. There were lots of smiles and hugs. There were kids wearing their new sunglasses proudly. There were mothers happy to have some vitamins for their children. Every kid (including many of us “big kids”) enjoyed the bubble-maker gun and the baseball caps. Our new friend, pastor, and counselor Manuel put his skills to work when a 23-year-old man, Peter, with a young baby came to our clinic, quite distraught since his 17-year-old wife had left him and their baby and gone to another village to live with her mother. He cried as he described his plight of caring for the baby and feeling unable to work because of the 24-hour duties of being a single parent in an area without daycare or other family to help. Manuel spent a couple hours with the man, and helped him work through some deep issues that he had been carrying with him for a long time. The man and his baby left with a smile, and with hope that they will somehow survive with God’s help. Manuel and Miriam will be there for this young, broken family. It was a very successful first day, with more than 100 people receiving medical or dental care, with 13 team members sharing their caring, with our new Ecuadorian friends becoming part of our family and our team, and with the ole bus getting out of the mud and clay. This will be a good week. |