Note from Ryan: Today we drove to a church South of the orphanage to provide medical services to a different area of the province. When we arrived at the church two things stood out immediately. The first was the small, simply built church that would have given any general contractor an aneurysm seeing how many safety violations there were in building the church. The second was that the church sat on the sand with the most amazing view of the ocean people pay millions for in the United States.
We setup inside the church with a few people waiting outside for their checkups and within a few hours of opening the doors there were over a hundred and fifty people crammed into a building that was meant to hold half that many.
We saw around three hundred people over the course of 8 hours, an average of about one person every 1.5 minutes. It would be a short novel to write all the things that happened, but I’ll just elaborate on one of the lighter experiences and let the rest of the group share theirs. One of the missionaries in the group was working in the pharmacy and got a prescription to fill for an antibiotic shot. Never having given a shot before, they fumbled through getting the mix together and prepped the syringe.
Once complete, they were asked if he could actually give the shot. Again, never having given a shot before, they were given the instruction: “insert the needle fast, aspirate, inject fast”. Trying to keep up with the 1.5 minute patient rotation they went for it and successfully gave their first shot from a crash course in needles.
It was an amazing day. Caring for so many people physically and spiritually, experiencing how simply people live and seeing the endless smiles from the local kids who seem far happier with so much less than what people “need” in the United States. It really makes you forget about all your possessions back home because those “needs” just don’t seem that important anymore. There’s something to be said about living simply.
