Honduras: a day to day overview

Zach and I came down to Honduras just a few days after the Lee University team arrived. Their stay was two weeks long and as they said goodbye yesterday, I will use this time of recuperation to glance back and depict a general overview of jungle life. But first, let me just once again say that Lee produces some fine people, perhaps amongst the finest in fact! Zach tried to give me an accurate warning of Dr. Martin, a Lee alum, his wife and daughter (who is headed to Lee this fall), as well as Dr. Brown (Dr. Breezy) and Mrs. Boyer, professors at Lee, and Janay, Mrs. Boyer's daughter... but there was simply no way I could have prepared my heart for such warmth, hospitality, intentionality, quick wit, and storytelling. They captured my heart immediately... Zach sure knows how to pick 'em.

We arrived at the hospital on Sunday afternoon and brigade started the next morning. The week before brigades are planned, the staff of the jungle hospital goes out to surrounding villages and passes out fliers that records where their brigades will be for the next week. In addition to this, they always have the locations of the clinics posted on the front gates of the hospital. That way, come brigade time, we have a hefty crowd waiting for the goodness that Dr. Martin has been blessed with and has surrendered back to the Lord for His Kingdom's furthering. On average, we usually have to be ready to go by 7 am. Whether that means starting clinic at the jungle hospital then, loading up the bus and leaving to a nearby town then, or beginning our hike to a nearby town. On this schedule, breakfast is opened at 6am. Once we are on brigade, we have several teams. But first let me describe the idea of brigade to you. The hospital has brigades when there are large teams staying at the hospital. Because we have more hands and more doctors, the hospital is able to see more patients. Therefore, efforts are made to try and round up large groups and the patients are able to see the doctors at a discounted price. At first, Dr. Martin had no intentions of charging his patients, but he soon found out that because of the culture, the patients were not taking their medicine. In their eyes, if they are not investing anything, the medicine must be bad, old, or doesn't work (if you can think of any other words to add to this list of synonyms, let me know.) Because of this, he began to charge 50 limps (I think), equivalent to $2.50 for medical visits. Brigades however, only cost 10 or so limps ($0.50). Due to this change, the patients are consistently taking their medicine and coming back on a regular basis. Anyway, back to those "teams" I was telling you about: we have students doing several things on brigade days. 

1. we have childrens ministry where students play with kids while they wait to see the doctor or wait for their family to see the doctor.

 2. we have registration: this is where we pull the files or create files for the patients. We find out their name, age, birthday, if they need consult or glasses, or both. We assign them a number and then pass the file along to the triage flow.

3. Triage Flow: This person is in charge of calling people in our waiting area to move along from registration and onto triage.

4. Triage: These students weigh the patients, take their blood pressure, their heart rate, and on occasion, their sugar level. After this, their file is passed along to the Medical flow

5. Medical Flow: This person is in charge of all of the files after triage and keeps them in order so that they may call the patients out of the triage/ waiting room and onto seeing a physician. 

6. Physicians assistant: This person gets to sit alongside a doctor and listen really. They are in charge of documenting the name and location of the patient as well as what the patient is diagnosed with. This information is us ! ed to see if there are commonalities between illnesses and the location of the villages. 

7. Translator: Each doctor has a translator if needed that... well, if you can imagine, translates between the English speaking doctor, and the Spanish speaking patient.

8. Pharmacy: After the patient sees the doctor, the doctor sends his prescription to the pharmacy. The pharmacy has several students filling the prescriptions and then having them checked by the professor and sent out to a translator who delivers them to the patient. The translator teaches the patient how to take each medicine: from learning how to open a push down and rotate cap to how often it should be taken each day.

9. Glasses flow: this is the person who keeps track of all of the patients who are here to get their eyes checked. They are in charge of keeping them in order and calling them back one by one.

10. Glasses: I can't be entirely sure what happens here because it was an area I was not assigned nor moseyed around but I know there was some type of "check your eyes machine" as well as one of those letter charts you have to read from something like 20 feet away. 

If brigades were at the hospital, we could be done by lunch or a little bit later (12:30-2). If they were elsewhere, we were sometimes out until 4! After Brigade, we would have dinner around 5:30-6:30 and our incredible J team would have no time to shower to take a break as they all helped in making dinner an actual thing. After dinner, the J team would clean up as the rest of us hung around or repacked the medicine totes for the next day. The days would end in meetings or game night, or worship... and then it was off to sleep to start all over again!

Getting There (Honduras)

It's always the journey.

Well, it was Friday the 13th and Zach and I decided to push our luck.... on TRAVELING. Having a tire pop on our plane while landing from the Bahamas, losing all of our luggage and the airline losing our reservations in Alaska, getting rammed into a barbed wire fence by a dying horse in the Dominican Republic, having to sleep with complete strangers in Italy, being completely separated from my group on the flight to Europe, and sleeping in a hotel decorated with live roaches should have taught me that my luck with traveling doesn't normally play in my favors. But we rolled the dice anyway.

Our original plan was to leave for Atlanta and arrive at 10pm on Saturday but depart again for Honduras at 9 (but since we had the customs thing... we need to be at the airport shortly after 6am). If you're quickly trying to do the math in your head... it's not a long layover. And I'm not sure if we could have hand picked less visitor friendly hours. Since Zach and I were not doing much on Saturday, he did what he does best: researched, and tried a few different routes for extending our time at home. Now Zach and I purchased travelers insurance which we had hoped would cover a change of flight but we found out that this was far from truth. To switch our flights to a Friday flight would cost $200 each (no thanks) and to an earlier flight on Saturday would be $500 each (never). However, he did find that if we called 24 hours in advance of our departure time, we could be put on a list that would give us a possibility of flying stand by. Boom! That was our in.

Instantly we began to look up flights and like gold, there was one leaving at 1 am on Saturday. This would put us home at 8am Saturday and leave us with a 25 hr layover. Yes please!!! We couldn't stop ourselves from planning things that we would do with our family during all that superfluous amount of time. Well... we called some friends and scheduled for them to pick us up about 4 on Friday to have some dinner in L.A. and then off to our midnight flight. Like clockwork (literally), the 24 hour mark hit and we called up to get ourselves on that list! Much to our chagrin, we were put on a 2-3 hr waiting call back list. That put us right at the time we were supposed to get picked up. Sure enough, 10 minutes before we were supposed to leave, Zach got the call and the lady told us that she couldn't put us in the system because the plane was not in the same class as our original flight. Zach asked if we could move to another earlier flight and she said she couldn't get us in anywhere. He thanked her and hung up. Hung up folks. That is the important part. We waited 2 hrs and were now left with unanswered questions and hearts broken. Zach, with a face completely covered in sorrow told me the news. I asked if he tried to find out why they told us this was a possibility and now they are saying it isn't but he said "honestly, I felt so flabbergasted by her news, that I hung up out of disbelief." And he was SO sad... he wore it on all parts of his face as we spoke. I called back to find out that the wait list had moved up to 6-10 hours!!!!!!!! while Zach furiously looked online for other numbers to call.

We finally got on another waiting list that was only 3 hours long but decided that in the meantime, we were just going to head to the airport. I mean, if we are there and seats are available.... right? But this did mean we were risking being in the airport 14 hours early. Anyway, cut to the ending: we were at dinner when I got the call from the airline. I explained the situation and it hardly took any finagling before we were on the list. We got to the airport 3 hours earlier and praise the Lord we did, because "the list" had about 30 people on it and the check in board said that there were ZERO seats available. Thank you to the 7 who did not check in to the flight, for it is by them that we were able to sneak on! It was 1 am, and we were headed home to the best layover either of us has ever had. Coach picked us up from the airport and took us to the Grays for a hot breakfast and a solid nap (since Zach and I only got a few 20 minute sleep sessions in on the plane ride). Then, it was pool time, followed by lunch, and dinner at my house with Parker and the girls, a sleepover, and then a midnight gathering at wafflehouse with Zach's family all before we had to get back to the airport.

From there, it was smooth sailing... except that our luggage was sent on the wrong flight and we had to intercept it and recheck it in with hardly no time to spare. Oh, and that our second plane was small enough to fit inside of Evan's old hot wheel carrier. But the Lord was with us and our adventure started out with the loveliest of surprises.

I didn't sign up for this

Loneliness: check
Poverty: check
Homesickness: check
Long days: check
Plenty of times for crafts: check


But the stealing of my heart and then having it spread all over the US... that was something I did not plan for.

Aimee Diocares walked into our wives bible study meeting a little late but carrying a scrumptious watermelon she had just cut up from her garden. It goes without saying that by this act alone, she already had me hooked. After we did intros and other such necessities, she and I started talking. When I spoke, her eyes drank up everything I said. She was intentional in her actions and went out of her way to make me, alongside the other first years, feel welcomed. I left that night knowing that I had just met a potential friend. She perhaps did not know, but this chicas friend bank was about to get at least one larger.

Shortly after that night, I met her son, Asa. OH MY! His blonde hair and brown eye combo had my heart lassoed instantly.  I soon discovered that he is about the absolute perfect combination of sweet, imaginative, and playful. Plus, he had a swing in the middle of his living room.... so, we were obviously destined to be buddies. He was pretty shy when we first met though, so I asked him if he would give me a high five and he did. But I moved my hand. Then he smiled. And that was kind of it. One glance at his heart melting cheese McCheese and I knew that I'd be moving-my-hand-high-fiving him any chance I could. So it became our thing.

 It wasn't until a good amount of weeks later that I finally met her husband. If I could describe him in one real life situation it would be this: Juan, Aimee's husband, had never seen me on the soccer field but only knew that I played. One night, he invited me to play on his team because he thought that they would be short some players. I showed up and can only properly describe it as feeling like the red head goalie from "The Big Green," They were awesome and entirely put together, and I was sorely out of place. And Juan, he was all but the leader of them. We had a saying on Varsity Soccer: Juga Bonita "play beautifully." That was Juan. He was as swift as a coursing river, graceful as a gazelle, quick as lightning, and had a shot like a gun. He played smart, he played confident, he played in a way that brought the whole team together. He was everything you would like in a teammate, but he sat out that game on my behalf so that I could play (they ended up not being short players that night).

To quote one of Zach and my's shows, they are just "salt of the dang earth!" kind of people.

And so we met; they were our across the campus neighbors (just a bike ride away), and life was still humming along. She did her thing with Asa, I did my thing with teaching, and Zach and Juan did their medical school bit. Our paths crossed each tuesday with bible study, or on any nights we had soccer games. I'd say thats where most of Asa and mine's relationship started: on the soccer field sideline. I would fake high five him, he would fall for it. I would chase him, he would hide from me. I would tickle him, he'd steal a little bit more of my heart with each laugh. I would do the creepy neighborly thing and pop in on them every now and then just to spend a bit of the afternoon in fellowship. It was a lot like the beginning of all new relationships except somewhere along the way, a large piece of my heart had found a way into their hands.

Last night this beautiful family moved to Texas and it wasn't until their absence did I realize how deep my love, respect, and admiration for them was. I laid in bed last night unable to stop the tears from running down my cheeks (and conveniently into my ears as it typically goes with laying down crying) and quite honestly, did not want to. I welcomed the moment of happy grieving and therapy that crying provides. But I found myself trying to reason inwardly saying "Man oh man, I did not sign up for this." And I didn't. Well, except for technically I did because you do have to sign your name on a piece of paper for the wives bible study but... I digress. I came out here with every intention of getting Zach through med school and meeting some good folks along the way. Never in my wildest dreams did those "good folks" actually interpret into bosom friends... and for all of it to occur within 9 months! But despite my feeble attempts and lowly expectations, the Lord allowed for far greater things to happen. I didn't sign up for it, but He graciously placed it in my path. I now have a treasure chest full of "momma tips" from one heck of a Godly lady, nuggets of wisdom spilled out during many a bible study nights, a rocking new homemade bread recipe, and two pots full of "Asa's strawberry plants."

Every day I am finding more inevitable "love notes" to me from the Lord... reasons to give Him thanks.... and you, Diocares family, were on the list since the first day I met y'all. I'm thrilled for Texas and all of the blessings it is about to receive simply by y'alls presence. Thank you for stamping your mark on my heart. I love guys forever and ever.