Sleepless in Tactic

This week has been rather sleepless.

Not because of being hungry, or too hot...

Mother's Day was this week.

What does that have to do with sleeping you ask?

Well here in Guatemala, if you want to give your loved one some attention, you pay the radio station to come by the house with a megaphone.

At 4 am.

So, we had a megaphone blasted in front of the house on Tuesday which is the Guatemalan Mother's Day. The neighbor is a part of the ministry and he had paid to have the radio station celebrate his wife. "Happy Mother's Day, from Eduardo to Nadi!". Then came the fireworks.

Seriously, fireworks.

It's all really cute, I was able to roll over and put a pillow over my head and fall back asleep. 

The other nights have been filled with dog fights. They get pretty loud. 

Enough of my rambling. Let's talk clinic.

So this week I have seen some interesting kids. 

One poor little girl came in with lower right quadrant pain, with increased pain to palpation, right leg movement, and jumping. That made me wonder about how her appendix was doing. I sent her to the Health Dept, to get seen by a doc and to have some tests run. I haven't heard how she is doing, but I hope she was fine. Operations here are slightly scary. 

I had a few sore throats, a fever, and a scraped elbow. 

The one that stood out to me though, was a lady who came in with heartburn. She was wanting to get checked for the stomach pain, and mentioned that she was told she was pregnant by the health dept, but didn't really believe it. So, I did another pregnancy test with her, which was positive! 

She didn't seem very excited though, so I was wanting to dig a little deeper into if being pregnant was a good thing, (she is married), or if she was not wanting to be pregnant. Turns out they were planning on having another child, but the first time she was pregnant, she had a lot of stomach pain too, and she was not looking forward to going through that again. Christy and I gave her some natural ways to prevent heartburn during pregnancy, and suggestions of what foods to avoid. We were able to give her some tums too. We took the time to pray with her, which I think did the most good out of her visit. God's presence always makes things better. 

The rest of my week has been spent cataloging all the glasses that have been donated. We are putting them into a database so that the prescriptions are easier to find. I surpassed the 1000 mark in number of glasses cataloged today. That felt like a pretty big achievement. 

My goal is to get through all of the glasses before the next team comes next week. I don't think I'll make it, but we will have a pretty good number of them in the system. When we have a team, we use our eye measurer to check the vision of people with eye problems. It spits out a prescription, and then we just have to find one that either matches or is close. This system will make it much easier instead of rooting through bags and bags of glasses.

I also finished my Uterus this week. Christy has dubbed it our official mascot, and we have christened her Birtha. (because it births things. hahaha...)

It's been a cool week, and the time is flying by. I can't believe I've been here for a whole month already!! 

We are looking forward to the next team coming in. They are the team that I came with the first time I came to Impact Ministries, so they are my friends. I am so excited to have them come, it'll be a little taste of home. 

To end this week, here is a picture of an adorable child with a goat. 

Love you all! and another Happy Mother's Day to my mom in particular, and to all the moms out there!