Call Dr. Bruce

Yesterday, Sunday, I did not get a blog post out. We had a very long day, and by the time I’d hiked the 0.8 miles up the dirt road in the dark to the hotel, and had my slightly warmer than freezing shower, I did not have the energy! I think I was asleep by 8:30pm.

So today was pretty much the same, but we’re getting in our groove… up around 5:30, partly because the many roosters crowing wouldn’t let you sleep longer even if you didn’t have work to get to. Start walking down the road to the clinic at about 6:30, to arrive before breakfast and make sure the clinic is setup and ready. Brenda and Oneida are fantastic workers, and of course have everything ready the night before and double checked in the morning before breakfast. This morning I stopped to photograph a man chopping branches off a tree in his garden, which was up about 12 feet above the road. He saw me, and wanted to see the picture, so he invited me to go back up the street to his gate, and up the path to his garden. I took more pictures, including some with his wife. They wanted me to get a picture of the house, and then wrote their names on a piece of paper for me. What fun!

After breakfast and worship, I made a call to our digital x-ray vendor to fix a problem we’d had with our digital x-rays yesterday. Had it fixed in a few minutes!

Lots of patient patients lined up outside our clinic, where they were checked in and evaluated for what type of procedures they could have done. We went pretty smoothly till noon, when we had a great lunch! Mid afternoon we had our next glitch… one of our new dental units, the power sources for all our electric drills, just quit! We tested all we thought we could, and finally called that companies’ tech support. They were helpful, but could not figure out what had gone wrong. We finally took it apart, and after some clever sleuthing found a solder connection that had been too hot when made, melting the insulation between two wires. It worked for 1.5 days, when the vibration finally wore through and the wires shorted together. We re-insulated, rebuilt all we had taken apart, and were back to work!

We had one woman who we were told walked all night last night to get here today. She had three little kids with her! One you can see sleeping in her lap as we worked on her. Another fell asleep waiting her turn!

While we are busy on the first floor doing dentistry, on the second and third floors there are medical exams going on. That is also where Tony and others are helping people into new glasses. That has caused a lot of excitement! The lines to get in that room are long – they even had to post traffic control to make sure the room isn’t overrun!

In spite of the glitches, we saw more patients than yesterday, and things went pretty smoothly. A great day! I again give great thanks to all of you who are a part of this trip by donating towards our work here, or by giving us your concern, good wishes and prayers!

Cascas in the morning:

Walking down to the clinic:

The road to the clinic:

My gardening buddies:

Lining up outside:

Working in the clinic: