January Medical Trip Day 3

Blog 3

Today started at 7am for breakfast where we ate eggs, bread and very fresh fruit. We were all dressed for church which meant we were dressed a little warmer than usual. We split in to two groups for church. One group went up the mountain and one group went down. The church that my group went to was the only one I have gone to in Chadirac.

At one time it had been completely closed in but they took down the wall that faced the foot of the mountain to allow for a breeze. This also allowed for possibly the best view from the mountain so it was a little hard to concentrate at times.

 Tony gave a message at the lower church and Tim gave a message at our church. They worship with so much passion and you can see how much they depend on God to take care of them. 

After service we had a hike back to where we left the trucks and took a 5 minute drive back to the massive hill from previous years. For those who don't feel like going through my blog to find my description of it, it starts off with a reasonable incline for about a hundred yards, then goes to a flat spot, then drops to a crazy incline for about 30 feet. It evens out slowly after the drop, and there are a few more brief steep inclines but all in all its about a mile as the crow flies but significantly longer in actuality due to the steepness. 

At the bottom we met up with the other group where the school is being built. The foundation and rebar wall supports are in for about half of the building and the other half will be set later this month. The building will be arranged in a terraced formation in a "U" shape with the vertical parts of the "U" being on the top and bottom terrace and the bottom part of the "U" in the middle. The space between the vertical parts will actually be a small soccer field which is really cool considering there is nowhere for soccer on the mountain with that much flat space that isn't occupied by a farm.

We had a quick lunch in the church that the second group went to and then began our hike up the world's biggest hill to go on home visits. We had a rough time getting up the hill and we only got to visit two houses due to how much prep work we had to do for the clinic tomorrow and how tired everyone was. Right when we were about to leave, one of the Hiluxes got a nail in the front driver side tire, so we got to help change a tire out there on the mountain. With as many people we had, it went pretty quick. I rolled the spare out from under the bed of the pickup, and while Oscar put it on, Sean and I put the bad one back under the bed.

Back at the Hotel, all the medical professionals started prepping for the clinic, getting everything organized, putting stuff in boxes, and labeling everything. The rest of us helped out where we could but mostly we just had some downtime at the hotel. After the doctors got everything organized, the rest of us were called in to the dimly lit back room of the hotel to do all the grunt work of labeling and separating medication.

Before we knew it, we had blown through most of the meds and it was time for dinner. The rice down here is incredible and I'm not sure what is in it but I can't get enough. We had pork and fish as well as baked carrots and salad. The fish, while very good was interesting because of the fact that they just scaled and gutted the fish, breaded them up and put them in a pan to bake, they had heads and fins still and that made some people a little nervous but I ate one and it was really good if difficult to get around the bones.

After dinner we quickly finished the meds and started packing everything we needed up. Tomorrow will be the big day, we really don't know what we are going to be seeing at the clinic and the 410 bridge says it is going to be the hardest physical day we have seen yet. I'm not sure how much harder it will be than carrying rocks up a mountain (see previous trips) but I guess we will see.