Showing posts with label El Salvador. Show all posts
Showing posts with label El Salvador. Show all posts
Sunday, February 14, 2010

El Salvador

 



What a great week! This week we did a first aid charla, a dental health charla, door to door vaccinations, and post-partum visits. The events were all well received and very fun to organize.




To wrap up the week, we were invited to a local festival of patron saints in the community. It was a fair with a ferris wheel and everything. We wore sashes and were the prize givers for the winners of a unique event involving fast horses, a very large chopstick, and a fishing line. It was nice to see another side of the community and to participate in the celebration.




We look forward to another exciting week here in El Salvador!




Brandee, Donna, Emily, Nisha, Shawna, and Shirley

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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Clinic in La Promesa


La Promesa is a town close to Alajuelita (where the FIMRC clinic is) that FIMRC goes to every couple of months to offer care. We learned from Dr. Stedhem and Dajan that La Promesa is a little town in which the government had put housing developments in, and relocated people who needed housing from other parts of Costa Rica. It reminded me a bit of Habitat for Humanity from back in the States.


So we arrived at the clinic, only to find that it had been closed up. I really admire the Costa Rican FIMRC staff for being so adaptable, since they were immediately able to find a house in construction on the corner that worked pretty perfectly as a makeshift clinic. So we set up an examining table, pharmacy, psychology area, and waiting room. Now what to do? No patients! So we went door to door, and to the market, asking the residents if they had children who had not seen a doctor recently or needed medical care. Surprisingly, we only went to about a dozen houses, but here word travels fast, and by the afternoon, we already were booked for the next few days! Here are some pics of our clinic in La Promesa and of the children from the area that came for medical care, or simply to play:

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Sunday, February 7, 2010

Hola from El Salvador!





We have been in sunny El Salvador for 1 week now and it has been wonderful!


We live in beautiful San Salvador, and our clinic is in Las Delicias a rural community about a 45 minute drive away. Each morning it's similar to waking up in Costa Rica and traveling everyday to Nicaragua because the guest house in San Salvador is in a very well-to-do area while the community the clinic serves is full of homes with dirt floors and an inconsistent supply of water.

Last week we had a very full week, we gave many vaccinations, we did well-baby exams, we did a pap smear campaign for the entire community, we started taking a census going house to house, and we saw patients in the clinic. Each day we walked miles and miles up volcanoes... literally. We are really grateful to be here as the need is great. So far so good! See you next week!

*Brandee, Chanisha, Donna, Emily, Shawna, and Shirley*

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