You Have Bichos

September 27-October 5, 2010

Last week was the longest, craziest, most tiring week of my life. From time to time we will have visitors here at AMOR Projects. This last week a doctor from Wisconsin came to stay with us for a couple weeks. He’s not Adventist but he wanted to do some sort of mission work. He happened to come across our project on the Internet. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s here.

Anyway, we started our first major clinical campaign last Monday (September 27^th). Sunday night we had a meeting to discuss how the clinic would work and assign leaders fro certain jobs. It was decided that Caleb would be the first leader for the Dental clinic, Stephanie would be the leader for medical, Hanna would be the leader for triage, and I would be the translator for the Doctor. What?! Translator? How in the world? I knew that it would only be by the help of the Lord that I would be able to translate. We were all a bit overwhelmed that evening. There were a few tears. After the meeting a few of us stayed up trying to do some last minute medical term cramming. I went to bed that night praying that God would fill in all my missing vocabulary. What was scaring me the most was not being able to understand all their symptoms and missing something vital.

The first day we crammed our stuff into the truck and the rest of us on a taxi, still overwhelmed and quite nervous. We arrived on a dusty road at an unfinished building that looked much like a church. It would be our dental/medical office/pharmacy for the next five days. A few people were gathered waiting for their treatment or just curious about all the white people showing up in their neighborhood.

We set up our stuff and soon it was time to begin. Our first patient sat down, I sent up another quick prayer and asked her about her health problems—a stomach ache, pain in her head, her bones, oh, and bishops. I translated all her problems to the Doctor and awaited his reply. He wanted to know more, I asked her more questions, more translating. Ok, Mebendazole, Ibuprofen, and vitamins. And that’s about how the rest of the week went as far as medical. Everyone had stomach pain, bichos, head aches, and pain all over their bodies for their whole lives.

There were a few interesting cases. One lady had a huge infected gouge out of her leg that had happened a month prior. She e had to keep coming in to get it cleaned. Another lady came in with Huntington’s. We also had a kid who had stuck a bead in his ear. We had to flush it out.

Other than that, it was a lot of the same symptoms, which was nice to translate for cause I just looked at the triage papers and pretty much knew what to ask. I was called “Doctora” a few times, which I thought was pretty cool.

On Thursday we received a call from home about 3:00 pm telling us to hurry back because a fire had started in the chakra (the fields). A big portion of the jungle was pretty black with little fires here and there. By the time we had arrived it was pretty controlled. Amongst the ruins of the jungle was a poor sloth. He was just hanging out on a limb a little scorched and looking pretty scared. The boys worked on trying to catch him. They were successful and brought it back to the house to live in the lemon trees. It only stated there on night before being returned to the jungle.

The rest of the week was spent fighting various fires multiple times an evening –some bigger than others. For three nights in a row we were bomberos (fire fighters). It was pretty tiring and I hated fires after those three nights. Only in Peru can you be a translator, pseudo doctor, and a firefighter, only in Peru.