La Presa

So today, after fighting the urge to be lazy and not wake up early/ call my counterpart, I had quite a great day. I called my counterpart to ask about todays activities at ten to seven, she told me that the Plan Basica (traveling medical group) was going to be leaving in 25 minutes, I live 15 minutes from the clinic and I wasn’t dressed yet, I told her I’d be there. I had to skip breakfast and book it to the clinic and for the first time in my time in Honduras, things actually got started on time. I jumped into the pickup truck and we were off, to where I didn’t know, with who I halfway knew, and what I would be doing I had no clue. After about 45 minutes of driving to ’who know where’ and after passing a HUGE sugar cane field/factory we got to the aldea La Presa, or at least close. You can’t actually drive to La Presa because you have to cross a sketchy suspensionish bridge over a river in the middle of the forest in the middle of the mountain/hills. After carring boxes of medicine across the bridge I knew that it was going to be an interesting day. We (me, the driver, the health promoter, a nurse, and a doctor) set up shop in their health building, where one part time health provider works and immediately the line started. Our job was to do basic medical evaluations of the people who showed up and then they could see the doctor and hopefully get help/medicine. Out of the tons of people who showed up probably 75% of them were pregenant females, ranging from 15 to 45 and it seemed like they all already had a bunch of kids. I felt completely overwhelmed for the first part of the morning, I was in charge of getting the prescription papers and finding the medicine for the people, the only problem was that all the pills, injection bottles, creams, pastes, condoms, syringes, and every other medical item were shoved into 3 boxes with absolutely no organization. After a little bit of me blindly hunting for pills I decided to use my US organizational skills (bet you didn’t think I had it in me) and I organized all the stuff and by the end of the time I could actually understand the doctors chicken scratch handwriting and find the correct medicine and doses and instruct the patients what to do with them…I felt proud. They also thought I was more experienced than I am, I realized this when I was introduced as ‘medico’ and they wanted me to take blood pressure and do injections, I told them I wasn’t quite ready for that, but maybe next time? All in all it was a great learning experience, getting to see what problems we are facing in the aldeas and what sort of tools we have to work with and hopefully how I will fit into the situation. Tomorrow I’m going to another aldea, leaving at 6:00…woo hoo!