We´ve Moved...

Lately it has been hard to blog at the pace that we´ve been living life and traveling::: through Europe, visiting old friends in Germany and Switzerland, and exploring rich scenery in Italy and Paris, New England with family and Texas with family. So I feel like i´ve left things out, but oh well, maybe i will ocasionally reflect anachronistically.

Anyways, we´ve moved to San Lucas Toliman, Guatemala on Lake Atitlàn for 6 or so months. We are volunteering-serving at the San Lucas Mission mostly to watch and learn about all of the wonderful things that this church parish is doing to reach out to the community in the love of Jesus. It seems like every week of our time here will look different.


Today is DAY 3: We had the privilege of accompanying 2 dentists to a small village about 20 minutes away by the back of a pick-up truck. There was an American and a Guatemalan dentist extracting teeth today. Matt and I helped set up the area, sanitized the utensils and assisted in patient care. Here are some photos.


This is Matt and another long term volunteer, Garret, carrying a large table from a family´s home to the local school where we set up the dental clinic for the day.





This is a shot of the set-up before we started. Notice how long the line is: many, many Guatemalans suffer from tooth aches and decay and some waited in line for hours to see the dentists. The two dentists working with us today saw 45 patients and extracted 75 rotting teeth.


Here we are at the sanatizing station, God gave both of our stomachs much grace watching teeth get pulled and cleaning supplies all day long. =) Once again, we were so privileged to get to tag along and experience this.



*** My main question was: how do they organize all this? and the answer seems to be that most of these villages at least in this area have a "health promoter" who has contact with a local coordinator who is in touch with medical groups in the area. So the coordinator calls up a village "health promoter" and tells him to spread word in the village that a dentist is coming next Tuesday at 10:00am to pull out any rotting teeth in this example. I was super impressed at the communication between villages.