Finals for the semester finished up this week with my last one being on Wednesday evening. After finishing up with that, I was up until 3:30am moving everything out of my apartment and into my car, then doing what I could of my cleaning check before crashing for the night. 6am hit and it was time to finish loading up the car and head to the Gerrard’s where they’re letting me stash it while I’m here in Guatemala for 10 days! Brad Gerrard took me to the airport on his way to work that morning and I’m almost thinking short nights like that are the way to go because the only part of the flights that I was ever awake for were the meals so almost next thing I know, we’ve landed in Guatemala City and after loading up the truck, we arrived at the hotel around 11pm and soon called it a night. We have a little over 20 dentists, a couple endodontists doing root canals, 4 oral surgeons doing the major extractions, and a bunch of volunteers to help out in areas of the clinic and humanitarian aid. In total our group numbers around 110 people and we’re scheduled to see nearly 1000 patients through the 6 days of clinic.
Friday morning we went to the church to set up the clinic and started seeing some patients around 11 and we continued on until about 8pm that night. Friday I was assigned to assist two different dentists as an assistant/translator and it has been a good experience to be able to get in the mouth with each doctor and also to be responsible for communication with the patient. It's awesome how once you get immersed in spanish, you eventually get back in the zone and it just starts flowing again. The first morning I was a bit rusty but things were a lot easier in the afternoon. We got back to the hotel and I went straight down to the pool and started swimming laps. I hit almost a mile in the pool before moving into the exercise room and getting 7 miles in on the treadmill before heading up to get ready for bed. I was a little worried about how this trip might affect my training in that I would be pretty busy and that there may not be the facilities to train or even that I could get sick while outside the country. So far they have taken excellent care of us and we’re staying in a really nice hotel with an amazing breakfast spread each morning, lunch is a make your own sandwich sort of deal, and dinner gets catered in to the clinic each night. While at the clinic, we actually have pretty decent facilities to use and at times you wouldn’t even know that you’re in Guatemala. Only on the bus ride from the hotel to the clinic and back, and on occasion when you see one of the two armed guards that circle the premises 24/7 do you remember that you’re in Guatemala.
Saturday we started seeing patients at 8am and I didn’t even get back to the hotel until 10:45 at night. It was a pretty long day as I had to take the afternoon doing my turn in sterilization for the oral surgery instruments which came through pretty much nonstop. The good part was that I got to practice the language with this 9 year old girl that was running clean trays back to the preparation room for us and so my spanish is rockin now cause she was talking with me nonstop the whole time.
In the morning and evening I did more of the assisting with patients and also spent some time taking radiographs in the diagnostics rotation. A lot of these kids are troopers as they travel from a different city and spend all day getting work done like usually 5 or 6 fillings, a root canal or two, then 3 or 4 extractions on top of all that, and maybe even a hygiene cleaning to top it off before traveling back home at the end of the day. I think the record so far was a kid that had 20 teeth with cavities to be filled and 6 teeth to be extracted.
For church today, we went out to a small town about an hour and a half from the city here, and after the service we did a “sub for santa” gift giving to all the members. We had quilts, baby bags, toys, balls, and even some candy that we distributed to them. One of the coolest things was that we also had a photo booth going where we took a picture for each family and printed/framed it right there so they could have one in their home. We then hopped on the busses back into the city for a devotional that had over 1000 youth and their leaders present. These are all the kids that live close by which we have seen/get to see over the next few days. I’ll try to update with more info and pictures as I have time during the trip.
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