El Salvador: Prep Day

Hola, mi amigos!  I am writing from sunny, warm, comfortably breezy San Salvador, El Salvador.  Today the weather is beautiful and it's a good thing because we did a lot of prep work for our week.

There have been an incredible amount of issues and problems we have had to deal with, even before we left Canada.  First we found out that our team from Guatemala, a group that comes with us each and every mission, would not be coming this time.  They needed to stay in Guatemala to help with another team from the US.  We also discovered that a man, Efrain, who does a ton of leg work for us before hand, such as purchasing all the medications we hand out, was fired from his position and wouldn't be here, either.  That also meant, no drugs.  We found all this out last Sunday, a week ago.  YIKES!

Then, when we arrived at the airport, we found out that 3 of our medics had either an injury or family crisis and wouldn't be coming with us either.  Another YIKES!  We also discovered this morning that our 1000s of patients sheets were photocopied incorrectly and that some of the meds were just too expensive or not available. 

(Just as an aside, being a Christian, I, and other members of our team who are also believers, firmly feel that Satan is trying to side line us.  He's fighting hard to keep us from doing the work God has placed us here to do.  Please pray for our spiritual protection!)

So, what does all this mean?  There was some serious scrambling this week to purchase meds, copy sheets, find more medics, and just make sure we had everything we needed.  It also meant that when we arrived, we had a lot of preparation to do.  The boxes where we keep the medicines as we dispense them were still empty.  This is something that is usually completed by the Guatemalans before we arrive.  On top of the usual prep of bagging children's chewable vitamins and Mebendasole, an anti-parasitic med, we also had to fill the boxes, and make sure we had all our drugs. 

The chewable vitamins, to be divided into bags of 30.

The big bottle in the front of this table is the Mebendazole, divided into different numbers for families.

Boxes of meds, ready for our distributing boxes.

Distributing boxes, almost ready to go, lined up down the hotel hallway.

Other team members went through the dental equipment and made sure it was ready.  Some worked on getting the items the medics would need ready.  Still others sorted through the huge pile of donated items for distribution. 

Boxes used to sort items for different days.

The piles are big, which is great.

Checking if the individual items are suitable.  We got a lot of used clothing, not in good shape this time.  Take note, if donating used items, make sure they look almost new, no holes or stains, please!



As I'm writing this, Chris is meeting with all the medics and they're going over what types of sympotms they can expect to see, diagnosing, how to fill in the patient sheets, etc.  It's been a busy day, but the fun hasn't even started yet, really.  Tomorrow is our first clinic day and we'll be busier than we were today by far!  But it's what we're here for, to work, to help, to bring God's love to these people.  I can't wait to see who will touch my heart tomorrow.