Soccer and mandarins

What a full day! Full of sunshine, a few misunderstandings, and new discoveries. As for discoveries, I finally saw the clinic--the location where we would usually be seeing patients that has been inaccessible for about six weeks. It's in the middle of nowhere, and it's beautiful. About 5 km off the main road there's a bridge over a river, then another 1 km of road to the clinic. We drove to the bridge, then walked across it and the rest of the way to the clinic. The bridge went out after a heavier-than-usual rainy season, and the repairs have been slowed because of the rain as well. We tried to get there a couple of weeks ago, but the road after the bridge was too muddy to even walk on. Today it had dried up enough to walk with no problem, but they'll still need to resurface it before vehicles can get to the clinic. I also discovered Buena Vista, the biggest town after the turn-off for the clinic where we happened upon a high school soccer game this afternoon. We stayed and watched for a bit, enjoying the small town scene. All along the road, there are orange and mandarin trees are sagging with the weight of delicious fruits.

One misunderstanding was regarding an 11 year old who we sent to the closest hospital yesterday because he has a huge distended abdomen, skinny neck, sunken eyes, raspy voice, swollen feet, and just looks terrible. All the tests they could do showed that everything is normal, but he looks anything but normal. I discussed his situation with a doctor from the regional hospital this morning who said that his prognosis isn't good and that "we" need to transfer him to Santa Cruz. In that "we" I heard the we of the hospital, but he meant the we of the clinic (as in I needed to put the kid in the car and take him to Santa Cruz). Now I know to verify this in the future. Sadly, we called a contact at the hospital who told us that there weren't any beds and that he should come first thing in the morning. So, we transported him back to the city and we (the we of David and I) will take he and his mother to the hospital tomorrow and help them navigate the red tape there.

Another misunderstanding resulted in not getting tickets to the professional soccer game tonight between the two Santa Cruz teams. I thought it was clear that I was in for it, but instead I found out an hour before it started that it was sold out and we didn't have tickets. There will be other games, and it was probably wise to stay in since I'm headed to the hospital at 6:45 am.