It's pouring down rain outside the hotel right now as Hurricane Mathew nears Guatemala. I don't think this rain is related yet but by tomorrow or the next day it certainly could be and these folks don't really need any more rain.
We spent the week volunteering at a medical clinic in a little town called Camanchaj. I don't think it's even on Google Maps. To get to the clinic one must drive down a short dirt track surrounded by fields of corn. The clinic consists of two OR rooms, one big room that doubles as intake, post op, and recuperation, and then off to the side there are two other rooms alternately used as exam rooms and dental clinic rooms. So the 30 of us got pretty cozy.
The clinic is run by Salud y Paz (based in Guatemala) and we were with a church group organized by Pura Vida out of Colorado. The clinic provides the building and basic supplies and hosts groups as they come through doing cleft lip and other operations, depending on the surgeons that come through. Our group had a surgeon specializing in facial plastics so he did a lot of cleft lip repairs, and there were two other GYN surgeons doing hysterectomies and vaginal repairs.
I came in as Support, which means do everything not medical. But my Spanish/English abilities soon had me interpreting and helping with patients after they came out of anesthesia and since the surgeons were cool I even got to scrub in and assist on a tubal and a repair. I won't go into detail on those. Suffice to say some very private parts were cut and put back together and I was in awe of the whole bloody process. Literally. Should one get the chance to partake in a surgery that is not one's own, do it.
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