We have returned from our trip to El Jocotillo, Guatemala. The trip was amazing. There were so many mixed emotions during the clinics - beautiful, bittersweet and heartbreaking.

We were able to see over 1500 people in medical and dental, pass out close to 700 pairs of glasses and have some people receive physical therapy and trauma care.
I love watching God change lives in the U.S. team and in the village.

One of my favorite stories is about a little girl who was diagnosed with a stroke a year ago. She was 4 years old at the time. The diagnosis was made after a fall where she injured her arm and didn’t want to move it because of pain. The diagnosis was, of course, inaccurate, but she had not moved her arm in that year. It was frozen in place, and her walking gait was staggered because of the lack of right side mobility. Her sweet grandmother had been praying for a year that there would some way her granddaughter could use her right arm again. Our PA examined her and sent her immediately to the team’s physical therapist. Over an hour and a half, the PT had this 5 year old learning to use her arm. She was relearning how to grab things, move her fingers and point. She came back 2 days later for a follow up and more therapy. By the end of her session, she was able to use that arm to support her upper body weight for a brief moment, lock her elbow and uncurl her fingers. Her grandmother cried with joy for 20 minutes, and the grandmother learned the simple exercises to have her granddaughter do to strengthen the arm. An entire life was changed….

Our physical therapist also worked with a woman who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s 9 years ago. She was on huge amounts of Cardopa/Levadopa. Nine years ago, her father had died of a heart attack in her arms. The next day, at his funeral, she began shaking and trembling. We hear that story and immediately link the symptoms to trauma, but the only reason we do that is because of the massive amounts of research done in the field of trauma over the last 50 years. That information has not made its way to the small villages of the world. The physical therapist worked with her physical symptoms, and the doctor from United Rescue Alliance and I worked on a schedule to wean her off of the Cardopa/Levodopa. One of the local pastors will work with her and others to process through the traumas they have experienced. Pastor Fabian and his wife Luceny have themselves experienced heartache and loss, and they are able to love people well through the pain.

One of our team members thought she would only be filling in here and there as needed. She was more than happy to do that, but then she ended up being vital to the PT/trauma team. She felt a sense of purpose and usefulness she had not expected to find.

Another team member found she loved doing the eyeglasses and noting the joy on people’s faces as they were able to see. She also became the fairy godmother of the village when she hired someone to give all the kids snow cones while their parents were being seen.

One team member felt useless the first day of clinic until he began determining the eyeglasses prescription needs of patients. He said he was not expecting the absolute joy he found in watching the light dawn on kids and adults faces as the blind were given sight. This team member was also able to spend 2 days at the Moore Center hospital doing repair work. He was able to identify a water issue in one of the operating rooms that was causing black mold to grow underneath the plaster. This team member is hoping to spearhead a water project for the village as well.