Last Days in the Polochic

Here, I just want to throw up a few of my favorite pics from the last few days and then we'll move on

My sickest little baby

Peter brought peanut butter. Best moment ever!!

Our good-bye ceremony- smoky, slow, and definitely different

Traditional Mayan Clothing

The Four Seasons, wishing us well

John just found out he caught scabies

I got to FLAT-IRON my hair!!!

Nica- such a cool girl

He took his medicine so good! He had a fever of 103.5!

Taking a machete to the cardamom

Teaching IV's

The Line for the Clinic. Pretty much every day. 

:-)

Fireside

Immediately following Semuc Champey, we drove to a special fireside (aka evening church meeting) for the Q'eqchi people. (Yes, that meant I was wearing a skirt and my swimsuit- we had planned to be able to change, but we were running late.) The church had just finished translating the hymn book into the Q'equchi language, so they held a special fireside where people from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and missionaries from the area sang the songs in Q'equchi to the local people for the first time. I thought that it was going to be spiritual, but I was even more overwhelmed that I thought I would be. The love for these people from the singers was absolutely powerful, and I felt so honored to be there at that time.

The guy second from right was the first missionary ever in the region -in 1978. He had helped to translate the hymnal and was so passionate and so excited. He was great to watch. Overall, it was an amazing time.

Semuc Champey

So this is the gorgeous post. Between three more crazy medical days was our "rest" day on Thursday, where we went to Semuc Champey. This is Semuc Champey:

 It's a natural monument in Guatemala that was about 3 hours away. It was breathtaking- a little chilly but so much fun. Unfortunately, it was this day that I started feeling sick and most of the day I was fighting taking antibiotics for a sinus infection. I think I would have explored a little more if I had felt better. Nevertheless, it was so nice to swim and talk to the girls. I even went down a couple of the natural rock slides, which turns out, are a little rougher than I imagined in my head. Ouch!!

Showing us the fresh cocao beans

Chocolate!

 And yes, I am fully aware of just how unflattering this picture of myself is. I went swimming AND I was sick. The key point of this photo is the silver gem I'm holding in my hands. This is a chocolate bar handmade by local Guatemalans, the kind of thing I'm pretty sure my mom wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. But I had to try it. So ignoring my fleeting thoughts of what the kitchen was like that it was cooked in, I had one of the most delicious chocolate bars of my life. It was a little grainy, made from fresh cocao and mixed with cardamom, their biggest export. I also bought the cinnamon and vanilla, but by far, the cardamom was the best. I dream about. I've considered starting a business of these chocolate bars. I googled them. You can buy exactly one cardamom chocolate bar online. They are $9 EACH! I haven't had one. mmmm....but it was so good.
And just so you know, I may have had a sinus infection while I was there, but my stomach was a champ the whole time. ;-)
The drive home was breathtaking....in more ways than one.
These pictures show the first way (gorgeous, right?)

And these last two pictures show the other way it was breathtaking. As in, we might have almost died driving across this stretch of road. Not that there was any other option. It rained a little while we were swimming, making this road more treacherous than on the way in. I was in the first. We had about 3 inches before we would fall. They made everybody in the second bus get out while the bus driver drove across. Interesting thinking there.....But we did make it home safe and headed to a fireside.

Bathrooms & Showers (aka Living Conditions)

One of the sweetest, most unexpected things about where we stayed was the fact that the villagers had BUILT us flushing toilets and set up little showers for us. This in a place where nobody had these themselves. This is Santiago:

Santiago is the coolest guy ever. He was the villager from La Reforma in charge of getting everything ready for us and basically organizing our expedition from the inside. He was so animated and so personable and just fun. (And, nope, he didn't speak English either. So I didn't talk a lot directly to him.) But anyways, I think it was his idea to build these showers and toilets for us. He was very proud of the showers. :-)

 This is the muddy pathway that leads to the bathrooms :-) Behind the 3 blue doors are 3 fully functional toilets. And inside the 3 green boxes that look like porta pottys are showerheads and wooden slats. The black tank on the top is what determined if we actually had water that day to make any of these things work. One day, 5 of the villagers were on the roof filling it up so that we could flush our toilets. The toilets worked pretty much every day at some point. If not, we filled up little buckets from the sink and threw them down the toilets to make them flush. The showers worked about every other day.
The sink in front is where we washed our hands and brought our bottled waters over to brush our teeth. And where they washed our cooking dishes. It was actually pretty dang nice.

 These are the little girls who stood here always and watched us do everything.

 Everywhere we went, there were chickens and ducks and turkeys and pigs. (Fewer pigs, they are expensive.)

We were awakened every morning by these roosters. 

This is the schoolhouse where we slept. My corner is in the
far back with the tall blue air mattress and two red suitcases.

One day, the shower broke, and I was dying to take a shower. Santiago rigged it up so that the hose fed into the door and I squatted down to use it. The showers didn't really have any place to hang your clean clothes, so I used a ziploc bag and put a hole in it and hung it up on a nail. I also brought a bar of soap, which was pretty messy and not too smart. Body wash is a lot cleaner in situations like this.
It was during these crazy cold shower times that I wondered if I was legitimately crazy for being there. :-)
We slept in a school house that was vented at the top. Right next to us was the kitchen, where tons of smoke came through from the stove and fires. Which meant that probably half of us woke up with sore throats and sinus infections on day 3 that lasted until we left. Luckily, I had Azithromycin (on the recommendation of my doctor) that I put off taking for one day, and then used, and it worked like a charm. I think it did give us some idea of what they go through every day.

Medical Clinic Day 1- What did we sign up for ?!

Gorgeous Morning View- This is what we looked
 at while we brushed our teeth

Medical Clinic Day 1

Unloading Supplies

Kaliska  was our "bouncer." 

So they told us that first day that between the four of us practitioners, we should expect to see 40-60 patients. We saw, instead, 132. AND, as professions, the four of us were: me, a women's health nurse practitioner, who really knows about birth control and periods more than anything, Kristin S., a nurse anaesthetist, Laura C., a hospice family nurse practitioner, and Tom, an ER physician's assistant. In this scenario, let's just say four ER people would have been extremely useful.

Precious.

As it was, we all were quickly thrust into feeling like we were working at an urgent care doing family practice. My first patient was a 70 year old who complained he couldn't move his wrist. That quickly put me in my place. (He had broken it 7 years ago and had never had exercise or physical therapy.) Almost everyone complained of stomachaches and headaches and sometimes even vision loss. It took a few days to be able to differentiate between worms, parasites, dehydration, heartburn, ulcers and true infections. Most people said their vision went black after working hard. That, too, was just dehydration.

Hernia? Nope, I think an ulcer or heartburn.

Over the course of several days, we got better and better at understanding who our patients were. Because this was a new village, nobody really knew their lifestyle.
We learned that:
1- They grow coffee. And so, that's all they drink. No water. Almost everyone. Even the kids.
2- If they do say they drink water, they say "agua de maize,"- that's corn water. Because everyday they make tortillas from corn and they drink the water they squeeze from it.
3- They have wood stoves in their houses. And sometimes not even one window. They inhale all that smoke every single day. That's why some of our patients came in complaining of coughs that they had had for 7 years.
After learning these things, much of our "prescriptions" included teaching people how to make rehydration solutions using sugar and salt, drinking water, purifying water, and trying to vent their houses. I told them to please share that information with their friends. I have no idea if any of it sunk in.

Counting out ibuprofen (I think). The guy in the yellow hat was one of our Spanish to
 Q'echi translators. Doesn't he look excited? :-) - He was actually really great. 

We also gave out tons and tons of ibuprofen. They probably all needed a bottle or two. These people work SO HARD. And their joints and knees and backs hurt like crazy. They need a yoga instructor and a couple good massage therapists. We did have a massage therapist with us, who did a LOT of massages. And I told the women to ask their husbands for massages at the end of the day (and vice versa!). They giggled and thought that was so funny.

This is what I look like when I'm listening really intently to someone translating my words.
 There are a LOT of pictures like this from this trip. :-)

All the villagers here speak Q'eqchi. (catchee). Some speak Spanish. No one speaks English. So every single question we asked was translated by our returned missionaries into Spanish and then by one of the bilingual villagers from Spanish into Q'eqchi to our patient. This was not a quick process. It was exhausting and entertaining and was also a lesson in being very particular about the question you asked or you would get the wrong answer and have to start all over again. It also made me die that I didn't know Spanish a little better. But I did get much better near the end of the week.

Every morning started with a health care class for about 15 people from each village who were learning to be the "rural health care workers"." This day was a neonatal resuscitation class where we taught them how to do CPR on babies and suction their noses. It's fun to try to teach suctioning to people who have never seen a bulb syringe. And it seems so simple to us. The workers were so cute and excited and interested. I really had fun with my little group. I even made some jokes, and I think they mostly got through. I really liked to make everyone laugh, and it was hard to know that I had to depend on 2 other people to translate my meaning! :-) There was a lot of gesturing and charades this week!

Kristin S. 

"Is the chest rising?"

Yes, I was very concerned. :-) This is my "mom" face. 

The purple shirt guy is 100. Everybody wanted their picture taken with him. He was sad because his hearing wasn't as good as it used to be. And sad we couldn't do anything about it!! Sorry, dude, you're 100!!

Arriving at the Polochic

(Sorry this has taken so long...it's a little crazy around here. And it's been a little overwhelming thinking of how I'm going to document all this! :-) - I also am using a lot of other people's pictures- I didn't usually have time to stop and take all the pictures I wished I could!)
The next day we got up early to catch our bus to the Polochic Valley (It's pronounced polo-cheek). The  ride up took about 12 hours. We spent 5 hours on an air-conditioned bus that pretty much froze my left arm to death (I rode near the window where the vent was) and the next 6 or so in a non-air-conditioned, smaller bus that looked more like a school bus. We stopped at lunch at another place where they said I could drink the water so I did (scared, still, but I did). It was a really nice place and we had delicious chicken, rolls, and vegetables.

The last few hours of the bus ride were rocky and beautiful and a little terrifying. It's funny, we kind of all got used to treacherous roads while we were there, but this was our first introduction. If we ever came to a ditch in the road, two of the Guatemalans would just run outside and fill the hole with wood and rocks until we could get across. Here's a 36 second video of what that looked like. And then a 6 second one of what it was like to drive across. I mostly appreciate the way the stickers on the front of the bus look like blood is coming off of them. That was particularly reassuring when we thought we might fall off cliffs a couple times.

Bus Transfer- our luggage went in that cattle truck

Half of us- I wouldn't have been in the picture if I didn't hug LeeAnn

This video is just a few seconds of what our crazy roads looked like. It was absolutely beautiful. As we drove through all the towns and random houses, people just stared and stared. I'm guessing not a lot of buses with 50 white people drive through. It was fun, though, because when we got to OUR village, La Reforma, we knew we had arrived. Everyone was lined up waiting for us and they let out huge cheers when we drove by. I was the first one off the bus, and it felt like going down the red carpet. Myself and another girl held our our hands and taught the little boys to "high five" us as we came through. I seriously cried. I was so excited to be here and just could not believe I had this opportunity.
Dinner was delicious. we had "steak" and baked peeled potatoes and corn on the cob and a fresh corn tortilla.
After dinner, about four of us girls played with tons of the kid in the very muddy grass. They loved "London Bridge," and I think we "captured" them all.
One of the little boys took the sunglasses off my head and then they each wanted their picture taken with them on. It was so funny.
Then, because it was Sunday, we held "church." Two people spoke and we sang "Because I Have Been Given Much" and "I am a Child of God" while all the little kids peeked in the room. We told them they could come inside, but they didn't.
All week long, we had just crowds and crowds of people watching everything we did. You'd think we'd have gotten used to it, but we really didn't.

I slept terrible that night. I had a great air mattress, but in all my concern about medical supplies, I didn't think to pack myself SHEETS. I was planning for the heat I'd grown up with in those Texas girls' camps (horribly hot and humid), but unfortunately (:-) ) this weather was GORGEOUS, but about 70 degrees at night. And I was so cold trying to sleep! I only brought a dumb little travel fleece blanket that was not even as long as me (I hadn't opened it until I was on the trip. I know. Dumb. dumb. dumb.) I walked to the boys' room, and one of them had an extra sheet they let me borrow. And the next day one of the leaders found me an extra sleeping bag that was incredible and then I slept amazing the entire rest of the trip. (No worries, mom :-) )