Notes from the week

The weather has been beautiful, and they’ve almost finished working on the bridge. Next week we expect to be able to drive all the way to the door of the clinic, but we probably won’t start seeing patients out there until July. While I’m excited to see progress on the bridge, I haven’t minded walking or riding horses from the bridge to the clinic. Horses are very common here, and they can sometimes been seen on the city streets. They’re used for transportation as well as keeping track of herds of horses. Out in Palacios, we see kids riding the family horse to school or to run errands, as well as mothers and fathers riding them to work.

The main crops here are sugar, soy, coca, and coffee and landowners are under more and more pressure to prove that they are using their land so that it won’t be reassigned. This means that they will clearcut forested land to plant sugarcane (even though this won’t earn them much income) in order to prevent it from being taken.

We rushed to the hospital on Sunday when Cristina called us because a tube was being inserted in her son’s abdomen to finally remove the fluid inside. I knew he had very little muscle mass on his body, but it was pretty shocking to see him without a shirt. Douglas finally came to the hospital to see Marco Antonio on Monday and he was moved to the ICU that night. He needed blood, and here that means that we needed to find a donor. Lisa, another volunteer in the house, went to the blood bank yesterday to donate.