Thursday, February 26, 2009

Mission: Monte Plata (part 3)

There are so many pictures of our mission trip, that I've decided to mush them down into one video. I will give a quick synopsis of what we did during our two weeks in the D.R. Our group of 35 broke down into 2 groups: 1) clinic group and 2) surgery group.


The surgery group took over 2 operating rooms of a local hospital and 4 surgeons and crews performed major and minor surgeries for hundreds of people.

The clinic group had 4 providers as well. We went into a different village each day giving primary care to the people and free medications. Every day we would load up our big yellow bus with medical and pharmaceutical supplies and head out to places unknown to us. Thankfully, our Dominican staff was on top of everything. All went smoothly. Even in the rain, we saw close to 100 people/day.

Each day, with both groups, began with a song of praise to God sung by both the mission workers and the patients. "Te alabare" (lit: I will praise you) was apparently well known by all in the area.

At the end of the mission trip, my friend Daniela and I took a few days journey down to beautiful Barahona. A nice ending to a beautiful and fulfilling trip. Turn up the volume and sit back and enjoy!



If the video doesn't work when u click on the black box, follow this link (but you will navigate away from this page unless you have tabs)

http://animoto.com/play/NLZHkfDDtKRQM8EbEHAidA?from=share

a little side note: the quality of the photos looks a little bit blurry to me in this video. But it is probably because we have to shrink them all down in size. None of them are blurry in real life. (just a perfectionist's disclaimer)

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Mission: Monte Plata (Part 2-Our Clinic Group)

Once again, these photos are in no particular order (sorry). Let me explain a little about what we did with this MMI (Medical Missions International) trip. There were 35 of us Americans from various medical and some non-medical fields. They divided us up into 2 groups. One group did surgeries. They went each day to the local hospital and used 2 of their Operating Rooms to perform minor and major surgeries. The other group, which I was a part of, was the clinic group. I'll explain what we did more in the next post. For this post, I just want to show who was involved.



Above from Left to Right: Dr. Val Creswall, MD Infectious Disease Physician
Jenny Eckerd, Nurse Practitioner. I really loved working with these guys.
Dr. Sue Giovanni and fourth year Med Student Luke Schnell. They all worked very well together. Some of the Dominican Members of the Team: William, the gatekeeper who signed the people in and helped with crowd control and, Delores the team's optometrist.

Even my friend Daniela showed up to help out a few days. She helped William with registration at first then moved over to help translate for the docs.

This here is a GREAT guy, Steve Trembley. He is a hard-working farmer who was in the peace corp many moons ago. While in the Peace Corp, he was stationed in La Vega, Dominican Republic. It was there that he learned Spanish. Steve was not only great to work with but he had a wonderful sense of humor!

The four young 'uns. From Left to Right, Heather Hall age 16 (the baby of our family), Ashley Waswick age 18--Both Ashley and Heather worked as our runners and help alls. Next in Blue is Liz Barton and then me. Liz and I mainly did translation. Liz was another GREAT person to work with and I really enjoyed getting to know her. While we were on our trip, she found out that she got accepted to Med School. YAYAYAYAY!

This is us at our first debriefing, trying to figure out how this clinic idea is going to work.

Same time, getting debriefed and asking questions.

This is Brian. He was one of the groups "pastors" and also helped us keep the flow of the clinic going, helped with crowd control and etc. He had a real knack especially with the kids.

Dr Creswell and Luke "hamming it up" at lunch time. No joke, for 2 weeks straight we had our choice of ham and cheeze or peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches every single day. yummm.


The Pharmacist Ella who had the busiest post. She gave out an average of 4-500 meds daily. Her helper Julie is behind her. Julie is a great lady who runs a christian adoption agency in Kansas.


Shelly helped with the intake of patients. She learned how to do blood pressures and weigh the patients.

Ashley again. While on the trip, Ash turned the big 1-9.

William again and a guy who helped us with translation one day.


The very expressive and vibrant Liz Barton closes out this post. Miss you all very much!! Please come to NY to see me some day soon.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Mission: Monte Plata Region of Dominican Republic (part 1--Ambiance)

From the start, let me apologize if these pics are out of order a bit. It's very hard to organize in HTML format. Ok, that said. This first picture: The rooster. No discussion about the Dominican Republic would be complete without including the roosters. They are everywhere. And they are very noisy. Did you know that roosters don't just cock-a-doodle-doo at sunrise. Oh no....All night long these buggards crow. One lovely rooster found a perch up in a tree so he could be right at ear level. What a treat to hear that at midnight, 2am and all through out the night!


Look closely at one of the lovely bathrooms we got to use:
The wasps who lived above my head on the balcony. Never got stung. In fact they all seemed far too interested in the trillions of flowers around than in me. (Thank God)

Outside the school where we were housed:

Stairs we walked up every day leading to our temporary living quarters. Each step is an attribute of Christianity: Faith, Hope, Temperance, etc..


I got to sleep out on the balcony. We dragged two dilappitated mattresses out there and someone let me borrow a mosquito net they had brought. Besides the noise of the roosters and the motorcycles, I thoroughly enjoyed my sleeping quarters.

The others weren't so fortunate. They were 12 to a room in bunk beds. No thanks!