Lessons on Perspective

So today is finally a complete day of rest so I can catch up on some blogging, laundry, and maybe work out a little bit. This week, the team from Wenatchee led by Drs. Dave and Susan Weber, came down. It has been great to work with them since they are the group I am closest to and I have worked with them three times in Guatemala and visited them in Wenatchee. I am always impressed with their solid committment to Tito, La Mision, the children at Palencia, and the people of Guatemala.

In Palencia, we did a clinic and the children did their annual performance for the Wenatchee team. For those who don’t know, several years back this school had gone into disrepair and it was essentially a barren wasteland. When the Webers and the Wenatchee team saw this, they felt God was telling them to breathe life into this school again. Thus, with the financial support of their church and another church in Texas, they got the school up and running, with each teacher and child supported by sponsors from the states. Also, every year they have brought a construction team down to extend a classroom or storage room, and allowed them to add on a grade every year. Thus, Palencia always holds a special place in the heart of the Wenatchee team, and the children always do a performance to show their gratitude and what God is doing in their lives through their education.

This past week we stayed at a hotel in Panajachel, which is a fun touristy town around Lake Atitlan, considered one of the most beautiful lakes in the world because it has five volcanoes around it. We spent the first two days doing a clinic at one location where I have been before. We do clinics at government health department clinic buildings, which often have only one nurse with extremely limited resources to serve their community. It has been interesting though to see the expansions to the building made in the past two years. There is even an ambulance to transfer patients to the local hospital! Over the course of two days in this location I believe we saw around 180 patients, and I worked in intake. Here most people speak the Mayan dialect of Katchiquel which sounds like someone choking on a chicken bone. Thus, we always need an additional translator from Katchiquel to Spanish for me to translate from Spanish to English.

At this clinic there was this one woman named Maria who came to be seen for some health problem. In these clinics, we have to be very specific in only allowing people into the clinic who have a number that we pass out at the beginning of the day. While we wish we could see everyone, that simply is not possible and if we always let just “one” more person in, than other people without a number expect to have the same special treatment. While Maria had a number, it was much later in line, and later I found out it was even for the dental line not for medical. I tried to explain to her that she had to wait in line, and then she would go wandering around for awhile. I would return to my work trying to cycle through patients in intake as quickly as possible so that they could see the doctors. Minutes later, however, Maria would butt her way in again next to the patient I was talking to, trying to be seen. Again, I had to have someone explain to her in Katchiquel that she needed to wait her turn in line. After about 3-4 times of this happening, I began to be annoyed. While these people are incredibly poor and have such poor living conditions, it is amazing how in intake when my mind needs to thin slice quickly, these patients begin to resemble some of those frequent fliers I saw in the ER in the States. As I said before, I

am working on redeveloping my compassion for patients regardless of their demeanor (or in the case of the ER if they are narcotic seeking). Maria definitely tested this compassion for me. Eventually, she wore me down and I told her we would just see her now so that she would stop wandering around and distracting me. While she ended up being seen and getting some medication, glasses, and teeth pulled in dental, I felt like she was omnipresently wandering throughout the clinic the entire day. You can see her poking her head in this photo, which was kind of how the whole day went with her.

Sarah, a nurse from Whitworth who the only other time I have seen was on my Core 250 Europe trip (very small world), was working with me in intake that day and experienced the oddity that was Maria, and eventually we had to just laugh about it instead of getting frustrated. It wasn’t that Maria was trying to be rude, she just did not get what was going on. And it wasn’t a matter of languages not being translated effectively, because I have enough experience to know when that is happening and I usually have the patience to make sure the message is being translated effectively. No, with Maria it was different. She simply could not comprehend no matter how we explai

ned it. I actually experienced this while translating for Dr. Susan Weber with several patients our last day of clinics. I realize many of these people had never seen a doctor before and didn’t know the drill, but even when we physically showed them how to lay down on the bed for the doctor to the examine them, they looked at us completely dumbfounded. And it wasn’t a cultural thing, because the majority of the patients understood our instructions, it was just a handful of outliers. And these people, including Maria, were the ones that truly tested my patience.

As Sarah and I discussed it later, while working with Maria was frustrating, she proved to be a very good lesson for us.

Sometimes patients that simply don’t possess a very high level of intelligence or suffer from mental illness require a lot of special attention and instruction and can become very draining, especially when you have limited time with each patient. This is the case in Guatemala, at St. Clare ER in the States, and healthcare throughout the world. Maria clearly had mental health issues in addition to whatever physical complaint she was specifically there for. However, when I stepped back and thought about the life that woman has probably led, both with mental illness and with all the immense challenges of living in a place without clean water and possibly under the authority of an abusive husband, it transformed my frustration into compassion.

While it may be uncomfortable sitting in a rickety chair for several hours trying to cycle through as many patients as possible, while flies circle overhead, and the people wreak of feces, B.O., dirt, and urine, this is not the life I have to live every day. I can simply wake up, get my Jesus compassion fix for the day through serving these people, and return to my comfortable hotel to hang out with friends. These people could not even comprehend such luxury. While I am eating my plate of fettuccini and bottled water for dinner, they are returning to their shack after walking 4 miles to our clinic to begin preparing their meal consisting of tortillas and parasite-infested water, perpetuating their endless cycle of diarrhea. While I am complaining about only have ten minutes to enjoy a hot shower in order to conserve water, they are taking 3-4 members of their family into a sweat lodge for their weekly bathing with boiled water for a sponge bath. As I complain about the few bug bites I suffered a week ago, these people suffer for years with unbearable itching as scabies wreaks havoc upon their entire family, never to be eradicated without adequate washing of their clothes.

Yes, while Maria may have been “draining” as she wandered around the clinic distracting me from other patients, I must never forget that despite my temporary inconvenience with her, at the end of the day, I at least could escape. There is no escape for her. While I don’t understand God’s reasons for this, she was born into this life of poverty and illness, and despite our attempts to alleviate the oppression this lifestyle holds over this woman, our efforts are merely a drop in an endless ocean of heartache.

Despite the apparent hopelessness cast over the homes of these people, this is exactly where the omnipresence and omnipotence of God comes rushing in. Yes, our clinics can temporarily help with diarrhea, muscle aches, and a rotten tooth, but truly it is only a bandaid covering a much larger infection. The best thing we can do for these people is to use our medical help as a vehicle for sharing the love of Jesus Christ. Because in the midst of their suffering both physical and spiritual misery, our vitamins won’t be the thing that they cling to. If they understand the love of Christ and that He died on the cross for their sins, in their suffering they will finally have access to the One who has been sitting right beside them all along. They can pray to the One who went without food for 40 days in the desert to understand the plight of their starvation. And they can cry to the One who suffered the ridicule at the hands of men in order to empathize with their shame after being beaten by a drunk, unfaithful husband. Yes, I praise God that He uses us as instruments for His peace, but in the end, God is the only One who can dry the tears from their eyes and give them a Father who will never leave them or forsake them.

I am so thankful that Tito established La Mision on the basis of this truth, and that at the beginning of every day we pray for God’s grace to be shown to these people instead of our abilities for which we hold such pride. We are the hands and feet of God, and if we ask Him to redeem our actions, then truly amazing things happen. An example of this came on the first day of clinics in a place where La Mision had only been to once before. At times as I said above, I feel like we are just applying a bandaid to these people’s chronic problems, such as diarrhea, abdominal pain, or muscle aches from working hard in the fields or weaving. However, this one woman came into the clinic and as soon as Dr. Susan and I saw her, we knew she was sick. She had right upper quadrant abdominal pain for a week, vomiting and diarrhea, and told us she was diabetic but didn’t have medicines because she couldn’t afford them. After getting an ultrasound, a urinalysis, and a blood sugar (all of the tests we have), this woman not only had an infected gallbladder, but her urine was filthy with every color on the dip stick being off the charts for leukocytes, glucose, and ketones. To top it all off, her blood sugar was 532, and who knows how long it has been that high. For my medical friends, she basically had a cholecystitis, a raging UTI, and was probably in DKA with a one-way trip towards sepsis. Obviously, we did not have the resources to care for her, so one of the doctors basically did a direct admit over the phone to the nearby hospital and an ambulance came to take her there. However, her husband apparently did not want her there and we found her again at our clinic the next day with an even higher blood sugar. All we could do was give her a bag of saline IV, and once the doctor finally convinced the husband that she needed to stay in the hospital she was taken again by ambulance.

This story is so amazing to me because so often I have felt like we are not making a dent. While God has blessed La Mision with a lot of equipment, there is still so much that we cannot do at the clinics. However, this was a prime example that the rudimentary resources we have were exactly what we needed to discover how sick this woman was. Moreover, without all the work of Tito and numerous others in creating this organization and the financial and prayer support of people around the world, we would not have been there at that specific moment in time, and that woman would most likely have died in her home. What a miracle from God! Another woman came in that same day with a blood pressure of 70/44 which anyone in the medical field knows is extremely dangerous. However, after merely 500cc of IV fluids, her pressure was back up to 114/70! Despite my lack of faith in the movement of God, whether it be in these acute illnesses or the chronic abdominal pains, God is using us as instruments for His peace.

Well, I hope you are all doing well and I hope some people are reading this besides my family :) I so appreciate all the prayers and support, keep ‘em coming! I have less than a month left in my trip. While my parents would disagree, I can’t believe how fast time has flown down here! In light of all we have talked about in this post, I leave you with these comforting words from Jesus in John 14:27 and 16:33

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”