Allison Wonderland: Last Clinic

Since this week is Semana Santa (Holy Week), all the normal clinics were cancelled. They decided to schedule a clinic in San Pedro yesterday. They had several extra people to help out including a dentist from Guatemala City, Dr. Sherwood Pope from Quiche and two medical students who are serving with him. This made for about 8 people total (excluding Duane) which means 3 flights with one extra seat. Leslie asked if I would want to go with to see San Pedro. I didn't want to leave our kids for the whole day so they let me go on the first flight and then fly back when Duane returned to get the third flight. It was so incredible! The view from the plane was amazing. Don warned me that the runway would not be visible for those of us not trained to notice such things and he was right. The runway was a bumpy, obscure strip of grass but it was incredible to land in such a place. As we were landing, the people (mostly kids) were all lined up along the runway. They were so excited to see the plane come in, it made me giggle as I watched them wave and point. Once the plane stopped they ran over to help haul our stuff. Here is the plane taking off to get the next load.

A common treat around here are "helados". For those of you who know any Spanish, this translates as ice cream. However, here it also means popsicles. They make a flavored, sugared liquid (either based in water or milk) and put it into little baggies to be frozen. Since there is no electricity in San Pedro they do not have helados there. Given the fact that it is hot there plus the Fickers have a lot of extra milk, Duane wanted to make helados to take to the kids in San Pedro. Distributing them was going to be my job! It was so much fun! Here are a couple cute boys with their helados.

Once I had helped Leslie set up some of the medicine, distributed my helados and played with some of the little boys, I headed outside to listen for the plane. I wasn't sure I could find my way back to the runway. There was no reason to fear because as soon as the kids could hear the plane, they ran back to the runway to watch Duane land again. I just followed the crowd. The second load included Katie, Don and Craig. -Lori

Stepping off the plane, I was greeted by lots of kids and my smiling wife (empty cooler in hand). It was a good day for a popsicle - it was hot! I was sweating in the jungle heat before I even started my walk to clinic. Here is a picture of a few of the kids surrounding Katie as we made our way to the clinic building.

Here is a picture of Dr. Sherwood Pope and his medical students seeing patients. About 250 patients were seen in the medical clinic by the end of the day.

With all the extra help, I didn't have my normal clinic duties. Dr. Pedro had come to Canilla with his church El Shaddai earlier this year (see our post from Feb. 8). I acted as his assistant for the day. I loaded syringes, washed instruments, handed out meds and all sorts of other cool stuff. With very little health education and an abundance of sugar cane, there was a lot of work to be done by a dentist. With the limitations of a fly-in clinic and the severity of decay, tooth extractions were the work of the day. We saw 68 patients and were still seeing patients when Duane flew back for us - the last flight out. In this first picture notice the young man holding the post behind his head while his dental work was being performed.