"Mi hijo esta en sus manos, y ud. esta en las manos de Dios"

Just a girl and her mono!

Newest member of the community.

 Things have yet to slow down, but I'm still here, alive and well. The last month and a half included a visit from Chantelle's parents, Cody, our director Shannon, a trip to Iquitos in the Amazon, then the last two weeks were consumed by a medical campaign and a group of Villanova students. So where do I even start....?

While Chantelle's parents were still in Chulucanas, I met up with Cody in Lima for his first weekend in Peru. We saw the sights of, Miraflores, Barranco, El Centro, La Parque de Amor, La Parque de Los Aguas, etc. We witnessed the changing of the guards at the President's house, a two hour long ceremony done on horseback, band and all. We also went to the biggest food festival I've ever seen. Here we tried smoked pork and rabbit, fish, beef heart, pisco, and chocolate dipped strawberries. The options were endless and the people were from all over Peru and South America. Back in Chulucanas Cody went to school with me, saw the Chulucanas sights, met and played with my host family, hung out with my community, and taught Christian how to swing a baseball bat better than I could. We went up to the beautiful mountains for a day to hike and walk around Conchaque. But, more than anything he got a taste of where I live, why I'm here and who my new friends and family are. It's one thing for me to try to describe my experience to you all and a whole different thing for you to see it. It was a blessing to get to have him visit, a really fun and awesome week to say the least and will definitely help in my transition back in the U.S.

Conchaque!

Stop putting the head in front of my face lady!

Good thing I have way better aim with a shotgun!

Three days after Cody left, Shannon arrived. This final sight visit included a trip to Iquitos a city surrounded by rivers in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Iquitos was hot, humid, buggy, and very over populated. The streets and houses were built unlike any other Peruvian city I've seen, the streets were beyond full of motos and trash, the houses were built out of wood and half them were built 20 feet off the ground. Due to the fact that half of the city is flooded December through May up to where the houses either look or are floating, buses are boats, taxis are canoes, and no one leaves their houses on foot. Because of the rain and rivers, they have 100,000 different kids of fish here, they eat alligator (pretty delicious), fry up worms for good health keeping, and have a different kind of plant for every sickness or disease imaginable. The land is greener than green, monkeys really do like cuddlying, and paranas are vicious fish. We saw and held tocans, parrots, anacondas, turtles, slothes and manatees. We saw jaguars, pink dolphins and other amazonian animals in the zoo. And, we even made new friends who took us out.

Paddle boating in the Amazon.

Four days after our return to Chulucanas arrived 48 medical professional gringos. The second medical campaign was full of surgery teams. This campaign was a whole different experience, much more full of hope, happiness, love, miracles, friendships, and extreme gratitude. The five teams completed 200 surguries of general operations, plastic sugery, opthomology, pediatry, and gynocology. As a translater I worked with the surgeons talking with the parents or patients before the surgeries to ease their nerves, then again afterwards to tell them everything went well. Then I worked in the PACU's with the kids and the second week with the adults translating for the American nurses and the Peruvian nurses as they worked as a team with the patients and families. I got to witness serveral hernia surgeries, see prolapsed uteries, cleft lip plastic surgery (almost passed out during this one),  removal of a gallbladder and pancrease cancer. I learned a lot about what an anotesiologist does, and how calm and natural an operating room is (they play music, tell jokes, and are willing to answer questions about anything and everything). I also learned a lot about general procedure, post operation care, and had the oportunity to really get to know patients that were there for several days.

It was really amazing to be able to look these moms in the eyes and tell them the doctor was going to take good care of their babies and that they were gonna come out not in pain but all better. These moms responded back with the most beautiful poetic way of expressing their deep gratitude. The most disappointing part of this campaign was that the doctors one, couldn't understand these women, but two that they were too busy to even let me explain what these women were saying to them. They were in too much of a hurry to get to the next person to listen to what I could never even imagine an English speaker saying. My favorite thing a mom said to me was, "my child is in your hands, and you are in God's hands." The people here have such powerful faith in God, such a way of trusting in him that they trust literally anything I could have told them. Being a translator the people would obviously ask me all their questions, and sadly only about 50% of the time I actually had to ask a nurse or a doctor for the answer. The other half of the time, I could answer it just because I have been to a doctor before, I know what basic health care is like. To us a lot of these questions would be common sense, but to people that have no idea what a doctor does, they were very valid questions. Even basic health care we take for granted in the US, but the people here are so thankful for any care at all.

The river from the sky

 Chantelle and I got invited to watch a C-Section, both of us went in excited to see a baby born by the Peruvian team, but then we heard it was an emergency operation. However, no one seemed to be in much of a hurry. Finally close to 40 minutes later they made the first cut, there is a lot of blood and A LOT of juice that comes out of the uterus. Then the nurse and the surgeon grabbed the skin on each side and literally stretched and pulled it apart, it was terrible looking! But, before we knew it we could see the baby's head, then all of a sudden it was out, but instead of hearing crying, the cord was wrapped around the baby's neck and he was completely blue. He wasn't breathing, was extremely skinny, then started to seize. The doctors were doing everything they could to save him, CPR, oxygen, etc. Nothing was helped, so we called our doctors back, they got him on better air as they waited for news of a spot in a better treatment facility in Puira. The baby was transferred there 5 days later, I haven't heard how he is doing, or what permanent damage was done. It's hard not to ask what if they would have been in a bigger hurry to get the baby out, what if they had the technology to see the cord was wrapped around the neck and the baby wasn't breathing earlier on? Overall, the saddest thing I've ever witness. Fortunately, the following day I got to see a healthy baby born and watching that mom kiss her new baby was absolutely beautiful, her eyes instantly filled with tears of happiness.

Medical campaign beach day!

The biggest miracle of the week was a 34 year old man named Porfirio who got wheeled into the examination room the first day with a plastic bag dripping nasty brown SMELLY stuff from it. It was very hard to understand his complete story because he was very shy and nervous. But, what I understood from it was that he started getting weird spots on his leg, when they started to spread, and not go away, they only explanation he could come up with was witchcraft and therefore the only cure he knew of was to burn the spell off. After lighting his own leg on fire, it became very infected to where the only thing our doctors could do was amputate it. After the amputation they did not think Porfirio would learn to walk again. He proved that wrong, he was walking three days later with walker on one leg. I will never forget his smile, how red he turned when you told him he was handsome, and that awful smell before hand, he was truly a miracle.