Well, for most of the last month we have been keeping the same pattern during the week, but this week was a little different. Some women from a church in Brooklyn were in town and they were helping put on health brigades. The bought a bunch of medicine and acted as the pharmacy, while doctor Mercedes, the doctor we work with, held a clinic. We traveled to several towns with them, and while we were with them we gave anti-parasite pills to kids, taught them to brush their teeth and gave them fluoride treatments. A couple dental student friends of Nick and Andrew arrived on Tuesday night and they helped us with health brigades the rest of the week.

I've attached a few videos from the last couple weeks to this post. The first video is of our trip to palenque. The town is pretty remote and the last step for getting to the town is by taking a mototaxi. This is a video of us taking mototaxis and of Andrew switching with his driver.

The second video is of typical worship music in the church at Palenque.

The next video is of people waiting while we prepare for our health brigade in the settlement right outside of palenque.

The fourth video is of a bunch of kids laughing. We spend a lot of time waiting around and this kind of thing is good entertainment.

Video 5 I took while we were taking a taxi through a flooded street. We were lucky we made it through that without getting stuck!

After that is a video of one of the Brooklyn ladies giving a show for the kids before we mass treated them for worms. We also read them bible stories.

The last two videos are just more of the type of things we do with kids to keep ourselves amused!

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The ride to Palenque

Palenque worship music

Health Brigade Preparations

Laughing Kids in Palenque

Driving through a flooded street in Cartagena

A show for the kids in Villa Hermosa

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Nick Teaching English

The last week and a half have gone by quickly and as always I have failed to keep up on blogging. They've been going well and at the moment I can't think of much to write.

Mondays through Wednesdays we spend at the clinic in Villa Hermosa. The last couple times we've been there we have stopped seeing patients and have started trying to organize a few of the boxes and boxes of supplies they have that have been donated. It feels good to be something where you can actually see you are doing something. It's nice to see patients and I think that we are learning a lot, but hopefully by organizing this stuff the will have a better idea of what kind of inventory they have and we will be able to send stuff that they can't use to people that can use it.

This morning we went to a church day care thing with our downstairs neighbor. It was fun to spend the morning playing with the kids. Each kid has a sponsor through compassion international for $20 a month. It seemed like a nice program and according to our neighbor 2 people have been murdered in that neighborhood in the last week and a half (one at a party and also a kid). So, it's a rough place where having this programs for the kids is good. The only bad thing I noticed is that the pastor preached to a crowd of 5 to 10 year olds for about an hour! I could hardly sit still, and I couldn't blame the kids for fidgeting and causing problems!

Last weekend we went to a village outside the city called Palenque. It was originally founded in 1603 by escaped slaves. It was a nice break to go there from the city and the scenery was beautiful. Because of the ancestry of the people, it seemed like we could have been in Africa. Next to the more established village of Palenque, which has 3000 inhabitants, there is also a more recent settlement of people with an indigenous background. They arrived there four years ago because they were driven out of their village by gorillas. The shocking thing is that their original village was only 6 miles away.

Well, we are heading over to the house of a med student that Andrew met a few years ago for dinner. Hope you all are well!

God Bless

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Palenque and Villa Hermosa

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Well, one week has gone by since I got here in Colombia and met up with Nick and Andrew, who have already been here for a month. My trip here went well and there were no problems except that one of my bags was lost. On arrival I met Nick who told me that Andrew had been kidnapped on a bus and was missing for for a day or so and that they were starting to get worried. Thankfully they were joking and Andrew came out of his hiding place. Loosing the bag was no problem because I got it the next day. When I opened the bag, it said that homeland security had checked it, which made me think that they might have made my bag miss a flight when they checked it. Once we started digging around in the bag it became apparent that one of the half gallon jugs of soap I brought broke open and got soap over everything. Thankfully things cleaned up pretty well.

We came to the apartment where we're staying after the airport. It is the apartment of the assistant pastor a the Christians in Action church, who we are doing our mission through. It's a nice little apartment, but always hot! I actually lucked out because I'm sleeping in the dining room and there is a nice big window there and I get a good breeze at night. It's pretty much always hot and humid here. Sunday night when I arrived we went to the old downtown Cartagena which is very pretty and had a meal. Things are surprisingly expensive here. In the touristy downtown, things are perhaps more expensive than in Nebraska.

We spent Monday through Wednesday working at a clinic that is run by the Christians in Action church. It is in a poor settlement on the outskirts of town (Villa Hermosa) and it takes us 20 min or so to get there by taxi. The clinic most definitely the nicest thing in sight. It took us a while to figure out an efficient way to see patients, but we've figured out a nice rotation system so that we can see all the patients, present them to the doctor there, and take part in their care. One difficult thing at the clinic is that there seem to be a lot of supplies that were donated in boxes that are not being used and are going bad. Hopefully in the next few days we can go through what is there and make sense of what the clinic has and help organize it. The clinic in Villa Hermosa can be frustrating at times because it seems like things could be more efficient.

On Thursday and Friday we spent time working at the state-run maternity hospital. They get ER problems and difficult pregnancies. Normal pregnancies go to another hospital. Our first day there we spent all morning in the delivery room with about 10 other students and didn't have a single patient! At least it was a good chance to get to know some other Colombian med students. That afternoon we gave up on the delivery room and followed some students in their last year in the ER. That was interesting and we at least got to see a couple patients. Friday, unlike Thursday, had tons of patients. We got to the clinic at 7:30 AM and there were already 4 women in labor. There had to have been at least 10 women in labor that went through the delivery room by the end of the day. That gave us each a chance to watch a couple births and each catch a baby. Andrew and Nick's babies were premature, and mine was huge! At the maternity clinic things are run pretty efficiently. We gave them some medical supplies and it was neat to see them being used right away (almost within half an hour!).

Now it's the weekend and we are going to Villa Hermosa to eat lunch with one of the nurses from the clinic and to help a Christian group that is putting on some sort of soccer tournament for the kids. Last night we went to a club that had been rented out for a party where the daughter of one of the ladies that works at the maternity clinic was supposed to show us around. It was kind of disappointing because she gave us the cold shoulder and we ended up not knowing anyone at the party.

One funny thing that has happened in the last few days is that we have tons of mangos. Every time the maid asks us what kind of juice we want, we respond enthusiastically that we want mango juice so that we can get rid of them. Well, yesterday we did finally get rid of them, and guess what? The guy we are living with bought more, since we apparently liked them so much.

I'm really enjoying getting to work with Nick and Andrew. They are both great guys and I feel like we all have a lot in common. I'm really looking forward to the next month.

Over the last week or so I've spent a lot of time thinking about the purpose of this trip. At first it seems kind of hard to justify spending all kinds of money to come down here and basically just shadow doctors. It seems like we don't make that much of a difference. I've come to the conclusion , though, that what we are learning now is important and that hopefully the connections we make will make us more capable of helping in the future.

All in all this first week has been a good one and I've learned a lot. I'm looking forward to the next four weeks!

God Bless

Martin

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Andrew in a tight shirt

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Well, I've been spending the last few days getting ready to go on this trip and I'm looking forward to it a lot. For those of you who don't know, I'm going to Colombia for the next month on a medical mission with a group called Christians in Action. I'm going with a friend of mine from school, Andrew Casper, who has been in this place in Colombia before and is already down there with another friend, Nick.

I'm not completely sure what we'll be doing down there but Andrew has talked about catching babies as they fly out of women. Sounds like fun to me! I'm really looking forward to improving my medical Spanish, getting the chance to see and learn new things, and also being able to help in whatever way I can.

If you read the blog that Clayton and I made last year, then you might remember that we had photos on this site as well. I still do and I've now added video as well! I've attached an album of us guys at the house and a couple videos of Eric and Arnie singing and also of Eric practicing with his band partner, Sara. I hope you enjoy them!

God Bless,

Martin

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Eric and Sara Practicing

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