As you may notice, our Friday post is a bit out of the ordinary. While we have not yet set up a Heritable Trust in Guatemala, a friend of the Trust, Jeff Dabkowski, and his Northeastern University Physician's Assistant classmates, have spent the last week serving rural communities in Guatemala. We were inspired by Jeff's stories and were moved to post them because his stories give a lot of context and illustrate very well, the reason we do what we do. As you read below, notice how much can be done by taking action. Be inspired and empowered by the ethic of the group. Most of all, notice the little things. Notice the work required to produce a simple day's portion of food. Notice how simple, low cost medications and procedures can alleviate pain and suffering. Notice how far people would walk for a pain relief pill we take for granted. Notice how a container can contaminate an entire village. Think of how technology and creativity, once liberated, and the chains of debt, once lifted can deeply impact lives. WARNING: Some of the images and writing below may be considered graphic. Please be aware that descriptions depict actual medical emergencies and situations. Writing contains few copy edits and is reproduced with permission. Day 1 Had a great day today. This country is absolutely gorgeous. An absolute can't be missed. We spent this morning sorting all of the medication we brought down. All in all we spent about 3 hours doing that and maybe, maybe got through a quarter of what we brought. We then had lunch. The food here is amazing. Elsie, who is the sister of Bryan's wife here, cooks every meal for us. This morning she made pancakes, and then cut up watermelon, papaya and mango from the yard. Then for lunch we had rice and beans, which were soooooo good. Last night she made us Guatemalan tacos. Still not sure what was in them other than homemade tortillas and deliciousness. After lunch, we hopped in a boat. After draining a bunch of water out of the boat, we got going. We stalled about 3 times up the river and about 3 times coming home. Its one of the boats that was made to film documentaries on the Amazon. So, because we do not have enough weight with us, it has a really hard time keeping the motor in the water. So every time it comes out of the water, we stall, then it kicks right back up again. We went to a very small village today by Guatemalan standards, yet one of the richest ones. It was half Spanish speaking and have Quetche (spelling questionable). You could tell because the main house in the village had a cement floor, a true sign of distinction here. They also had enough money for a tin roof, something which is almost unheard of. They use a diesel press to mill their corn and there is a trash can which collects water and drips right into the corn so that they can make tortillas. Vitamins are the biggest deficiency here. Some people have never seen a vitamin in their life. So a month’s worth of vitamins helps these kids go to school and learn, something they can't do without them. Sad when you think about it. All in all, we only saw 72 people today. A lot of antibiotics, fungus medicines and like I said, vitamins. We sadly are out of worm medication as it was backordered in the US. It’s sad because some of the kids and adults for that matter, look like they just eat well. However, when we look at their stomachs, they protrude out about a foot on their small frame. Most the time, this is attributed to malnutrition, but in Guatemala most of these stomachs are completely filled with pounds and pounds of worms. All it takes is one pill to completely cure them. Sadly we are down to our last pill though, so we won't be much help for worms. But luckily we have many new antibiotics which are fresh that we can work with. We also came down with a lot of Urinary tract products and pain medication, something which has a huge need down here. So we will be able to do some good. We concluded the clinic in about an hour all in all. When we were done, Bryan and Marlenie (who run the operation here) got word of a girl who was very sick and couldn't come to clinic because she couldn't walk. So Bryan and Marlene took myself and Amy (who is a second year student) and we went to have a look. The girl, who looked to be about 30 someodd years old was more like 18, and had just had a C-section 15 days ago. The closest hospital to here is an hour and a half away (if you have a car). By canoe, which is how many people on the river travel, it could take a day. If you are lucky enough to own a horse, you could probably get there by sundown. I'll describe more about this in future emails. Anyway, she had been stitched up with one of the worst suturing jobs I had ever seen. These sutures should have come out in 5 days. Instead, today was day 15. She had a major infection. Some skin had healed over, some was oozing. We had to dig around and find the sutures so that we could get them out and help her infection go away. Took us about 30 minutes to do this. It was about 100 degrees inside their hut and we were sweating literal buckets. We were able to finally remove the whole suture ( a minor miracle) and we had antibiotics to give her. Likely she won't understand how to take them, but we can hope and that's the best. We went back to our apartment complex, which is an absolute paradise. Our rooms are bunk beds and AIR CONDITIONED. Amazing considering I don’t think it has been below 70 or 75 at night, and is about 95 degrees in the sun during the day. We are on the third floor here, overlooking the largest lake in Guatemala. We have mountains on either side of a palm grove off to the west. We have a big palm hut on the roof over a porch, which is where we just hang out. Bryan and Marleinie have a beautiful daughter who is 6 years old and may be the most beautiful girl on earth. She has become my new instant best friend and gives me a hug every morning and every night before she goes to bed. The people here are amazing. Town is actually very similar to Holbox Island in Mexico. The people all wave and stare at us because we are white, but also because we are here to help them. Every single villager I met said hola, smiled, and waved. They are so happy for any help they can possibly get. Stores and crafts, and people selling food line the streets. There are so many vegetables here. Tomatoes, cabbage, peppers and bananas are by far the most common sight. Elsie makes us homemade salsa for every meal to go along with other vegetables that tastes so good, it makes the stuff we get in the US after it has shipped taste like poo. Bryan has set up a projector in the palm hut that projects onto a large white piece of sheetrock. We are watching a movie up there right now. It truly is paradise. It may even be close to beating out New Zealand on my most beautiful list. I'll wait til the end of the week to make that determination. For now, I'm going to get back to the movie. We organized more medicine tonight to get ready for tomorrow. We head up the lake by truck tomorrow to another village. This is a moderate village and 250 people are expected to attend. All in all we will probably see about 3-5000 patients this week, not including emergencies. cielo carla giere wants to say hi, she just typed her whole name with me. She is 6 and can speak English and Spanish. She wants to type her abcs abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. I'll write again tomorrow hopefully. Day 2 Just finished our second clinic today. This was much bigger. We drove for about 30 minutes up some rolling mountains to a really remote village today. We saw 275 people. Nothing too serious. One lady walked for the entire day from her village at the top of another mountain, just to come and get some Advil and a bag of cold medicine. Pretty amazing what these people will go through. The kids entertained us with a soccer game during their recess from school. We just watched and sweated bullets, while they were running full speed and it didn't seem to phase them. One kid was even wearing a Red Sox shirt, naturally I took a picture with him. We took a lot of pictures of the villagers today. It scares many of them, because no one has a mirror, some of them don't even have walls on which they would hang a mirror in their home. This means that this was the first time they have ever seen themselves, when they looked at the digital picture. Most kids started cracking up and then would make fun of one another. The real little ones were scared and started to cry. And then they realized it was them, and smiled back. Only 1/4 of the people in the village today spoke Spanish, so it was a little more difficult to communicate. We used the local pastor to translate from Spanish to Quetche, which was difficult since our spanish is not fluent. I gotta say it has come a long way though in a couple days. We can definitely tell them how to dose and take their medications now without any problem. Tonight we will go into town and meet some of the locals, and maybe do some bartering. It’s a big crafts town here. They put their food and crafts out at 4am and leave at midnight. Some of them will only make about 4 Quetzales in that time, the equivalent of about 60 US cents. Then they walk home to remake new food, and walk back to do it again. So hopefully we can help them out and buy a couple things. Day 3 So we just concluded day 3 here today. We drove about an hour up into the jungle this morning to a very remote village. We were going to take the big bus, but it cannot handle the roads. There are not many vans or anything like that here, so when we have to travel, pretty much we cram into the back of a pickup truck. There is a bar system over the top for us to hang onto. It’s actually very safe and sturdy. I feel better standing back there than I do in the back of a wobbly van. We attach a trailer to the back which we load up with medicines, tables, and all our supplies to run a clinic. We had to go over many different mountains today to get there. When we finally got there, the chief of the Mayan village greeted us and we set up in the school yard. It was a huge turnout. We saw over 400 people today. This village is so remote that we saw a lot, and I mean a lot of little kids with Scurvy today. Some people walked since early in the morning so that they could just get a bag of 15, only 15! Vitamin C tablets. Truth is, that will probably be enough to make the kid go running around at full speed again. Also, there was not much fresh water nearby this village that we saw. So we treated a lot of little kids with amoebas and worms again. Luckily, we found a flagyl supply in the storeroom here, so we were able to treat all the amoebas! We also found a different worm medicine. This one isn't as easy as the other ones as the people have to take one pill in the morning and one pill at night for 5 days. We don't have English to Spanish translators with us. You'd be surprised how well our Spanish has picked up since the first day. We did however have many Spanish to Quetche translators with us today, which was great because only 10% of the village had ever seen or heard Spanish before. They learn Spanish in school though, so we hope that some of our directions will be understood. The biggest problem here is with antibiotics. They think because they are receiving medicine from white people, that it is magic and works instantly. It’s sad, but that is very much how they think. They don't really understand the idea that you have to take one pill every day for a week in order to feel better. If they don't feel better by the next day, they stop taking it, and say that our medicine doesn't work. So we spent alot of time today with the Quetche translators going over how to take the pills and for how long. Like I said we saw over 400 people today. The heat was incredible. It has to be over 100 degrees. There is no form of ventilation in these villages. Most live in wood huts with tin roof (if they are rich), or palm roofs otherwise. By rich, you can estimate that the family maybe makes 40-80 dollars per week. Kinda puts things in perspective. For example: All land here is cultivated by hand using machetes, because the terrain is so steep, they cannot use tractors. Therefore, they plant corn on all the mountain side. They work from sunup (about 4:30am) to sundown (about 6:30pm) cutting and harvesting the corn. They throw the corn they harvest in a satchel that has a thick strap. They put the thick strap around their forehead and the bag drapes behind them. They will walk down the village to the main road like this. Probably 10-20 miles of very hilly and steep terrain. If they are lucky, they can hitch a ride at the main road into the main city of Rio Dulce. For city size (think the main strip in Amherst from Antonios to Charlies) and that is the CITY. If they can't hitch a ride, they continue walking the additional 30 miles or so, each carrying 100 pounds of corn. When they get to Rio Dulce, they sell the corn for about 11 Quetzales we are told (the equivalent of $1.50). Then they pick up some wood for their fires at home, and carry 50 pounds of wood all the way home, picking more up as they go. This way they have fuel to make their tortillas when they get home. Most eat tortillas for every meal. If they are lucky they can have beans, and maybe a half of a cup of black coffee, for those that are able to afford that. While there are a lot of natural resources here as food, fish, and vegetables, if they were to keep any for themselves, they would not survive, because they wouldn't make enough money to keep their family alive. The traditional family here has at least 6 kids, but usually 9. The village we were at today had about 9 kids per family. I'll talk more about this tomorrow. For now, we had a very successful day. A lot of kids are way healthier than they were yesterday. It will be amazing the transformation that village will go through in the next 30 days. The kids will have energy to learn in school. They will be able to go out and play soccer. And with any luck, many of them will be able to learn how to read (something that we are told that the majority of villages cannot do. We restocked our bags this afternoon and are ready to go out to another village tomorrow, where we are estimating about 300 villagers will come out. As we got ready to leave today, the chief of the village and the mayor, as he is called, gathered all the ladies and children around to thank us for what we had done, and how much it meant to have people travel from as far away as we did just to help them and their kids. He had some of the men harvest 10 coconuts, which they gave to us to say thanks. They cut them open and let us drink the coconut water as a way to refresh. It brought a smile to everyone’s face. Then they all waved to us as we drove off. A pretty incredible sight by anyone’s standards. Especially considering how scared they were to see white people, no less some white people with blonde hair in their village. Funny thing was, everyone was too scared to take a picture with us today, so we only have individual pictures of villagers from today and few with us. Even the sight of a camera made everyone run away or cry today. Such an interesting reaction. Day 4 Well, no villages today, just a well deserved day off. That meant that we got to spend a day seeing the sights of Guatemala and the Rio Dulce river valley. We started the day off at the end of a river (think stream). It certainly did not look like much to start. Bryan had gone to deliver medical care to a village a while back. Well today at the river, we met the son of the chief of that village. He met us at this stream with a wooden canoe which had been hollowed out, out of an an entire tree, Pretty cool. We paddled up the river through a series of canyons. The best way to think about this would be to picture the canyon scenes from Jurassic Park. There was jungle on each side of us. Since we got there at about 10 in the morning, the howler monkeys were not out. Normally, they come out around 5pm, and they come out in so many numbers that they are literally crawling everywhere. It was a pretty awesome natural sight. The chief's son and his brothers were very entertaining throughout the entire trip. They would climb up the rock cliffs, and jump off like it was no problem. One climbed about 35 feet in maybe 30 seconds. A minute tops. And they would jump off and try and scare each other. We all got pretty good laughs out of this. We got back to our truck, only to find that we had a flat tire. We were 30 minutes from the closest village. We changed the spare tire in, but it was not strong enough to carry all 14 of us home. So we drove to the next village over and went to the tire shop. The tire shop consisted of 3 guys, one grandfather, one middle age and their very young son. They sit under a tin roof with tires around them out in the open. That's it. They immediately got to work fixing our tire. They inflated a rubber tire to put inside our tire. Then patched the outside. I believe it cost us a whopping 200 Quetzales for the parts and the labor. Probably will set that family for an entire month, or at least 2 weeks. The equivalent of about 25 dollars. Try getting that type of deal in the states. So we ate lunch while the tire was fixed, and then hit the road, back towards our house. We stopped along the way at a set of waterfalls. The water was as clear as I've ever seen any water. But when we got to the waterfalls, it was incredible. It had rained this morning, so there was some water flowing. They have not had a significant rain here in well over a month. But anyway, the waterfalls are fed by a thermal vent. The water was steaming. When we jumped in the water was remarkably cool for swimming. Yet when you got to the waterfall, it was hot enough to burn your skin. We had to duck under the waterfall to get into a cave, which ended up being the most exotic sauna I have ever sat in. It was as steamy as you could get any fake sauna. The air was well over 100, yet the water we were swimming in was probably only 80 degrees near the falls, even though the water falling was about 120-140 degrees. Still not quite sure how this happened. But it felt amazing. We climbed up the waterfall to see the source of the vent at the top. We had to grab alot of vines and rocks (think Jungle Book) to get to the top. There was an opening in the rock at one point, at which we first put our hands in only to have our hand come out covered in guano. It was a bat cave, and there were literally hundreds of bats flying inside and squeeking. The smell was as similar to rotten compost as you could get. When we got back in, we soaked off that smell for quite a while. Then we hopped back in our truck to head home. As we dried off in the back going down the road, we watched as our suits changed from our wet dark colors, to a nice shade of light yellow from all the sulfur that had soaked into us. We smelled awesome as you might imagine. We came back and restocked to go out to another village bright and early tomorrow morning. We are expecting about 250 people again tomorrow. We should still have plenty of supplies which is great. But I really hope the next team brings down tons, because the people here need it. Many people have wondered how education can help here. That is the million dollar question. If anyone could figure that out, they would be chief of any village here. The majority of people here will go through their life without ever learning how to read or write. You can imagine how that limits any sort of educational application. The government of Guatemala pays for public schooling up til grade 6. After that, if you want to go on, you have to pay. I've given you examples of the wages these families make in a day, so you can imagine, that is not enough to send anyone to school. Most people who send their kids to school are lucky enough (and I use that term loosely), to be hired as cleaning people for those who rent houses in the area. Certainly not a lush job by any means. For example, our cook Elsie would be a good example. For about $40 US dollars per week, she gets up at 5am to cook us breakfast and prepare lunch for us to take to the village. After we leave, she then tends to the yardwork, cleans up the facilities and the bathrooms, then gets back to making dinner. While she has a very nice job in the eyes of Guatemalans, she too cannot read or write. She does speak Spanish, but that is not well either, and she speaks many incorrect words. Regardless, she is an absolute incredible cook and has even allowed me to help her cook. I try to carry a conversation with her and it makes her day. The other day Bryan said a collective thank you from all of us and gave her a hug, and it literally brought her to tears. She had no idea how appreciated she was. Bryan said that no man had ever once said thank you or that they appreciated her at any time in her life before this. Such a simple gesture made her break down. This brings to light another problem in Guatemala. Women are not treated as equals. I don't mean to sound brash when I say describe the following, just merely telling it how it is, which is sad enough. Women here are thought of as baby makers. The average girl has her first child at the age of 14 or 15. They will go on to have on average between 6-9 kids, depending on the village. They are treated by their men in a way that would land anyone in jail in the US. They are not shown affection at any point of their lives. The only time a male will touch her or talk to her is when he wants to have sex with her. Its really quite sad. We are told that it is how a many proves that he is macho, and the man of the village. The women on the other hand, make the tortillas and look after the babies. You'd be amazed how hard it is to tell the ages of the girls here. It already has become second nature for us to give prenatal vitamins to a girl who is 14, we have done it many times this week alone. Or to have a 15 year old come through the line holding her already one year old baby. That is just how they live. By the time they are our age (25), they look like they are 40 years old, because they have likely already given birth to 4 or 5 children. We have seen very few old people on this trip. However, one of our brightest moments was when this old spry lady walked up to us to get some calcium pills and vitamins. It turns out she was 100 years old. A miracle down here I would think. Certainly made us feel good. Malnutrition is the obvious problem. Worms are no easy treat either as I've described. The reason is that there are so many stray dogs around here. They are all throughout the villages, they are skinny as can be. Many of the kids in the first village we went to this week, were lucky enough to have shoes, as the people were pretty well off. The village we went to yesterday, less than half the kids, probably more like a quarter, could even afford sandals, nevermind shoes. That means, that 75% of the kids, walk around barefoot. They step in the feces that all these dogs leave all over the village. The worms get in through their toes, travel through their blood and lungs, then eventually land in their stomach. Like I mentioned, that one pill, is like a wonder drug here, but is in incredibly short supply. Imagine how it would hardly be needed if the kids could have a simple pair of sandals or shoes. Makes you think for a second. The 90-100 degree temperatures, suck everything right out of you. When I post pictures you will see how hot it was. The fact that we have to wear scrub pants and shirts does not help. How the villagers that work in the fields wear long pants and cut down trees and crops with their machetes by hands is beyond me. Remember back when we took the stitches out of the lady who had the C-section. You will notice a picture when I can post them, that was taken 5 minutes after we got in the hut. It is not the most flattering, but the sweat down the back and down the legs, says all that can be described of the heat here. 5 MINUTES! Finally, last night after dinner, a boy who couldn’t have been more than 15 years old, was dragged up to our apartment, which also has a semi-emergency room in the first floor. He had been working out in the fields and had fallen. This normally wouldn't be a problem as we think of farming in the US. But remember how I talked about the terrain here. You can fall, harvesting corn, and literally fall a hundred feet til you stop again. He was clutching his right ribs. Bryan had a pretty cursory look at him and said he should get checked out at the hospital and there wasn't much more we could do. While the family was trying to figure out how they were going to make that happen. I decided to give him an exam. He was clutching the lower half of his right ribs, yet he looked like he was still breathing from his chest. Right away, raised some red flags with me. I touched his stomach and he screamed something in Spanish (I won't repeat). It was killing him in all 4 quadrants. That will get you an automatic stay in any US hospital. I had Bryan come examine his stomach, and we both came to the conclusion, that he needed to be completely examined. I kept going with the exam by listening to his lungs, which was pretty much all I could do. I started with his right lung, becuase it wasn't hurting. Sounded clear as day. Then I tried matching his left lung to his right. The top sounded fine. I examined the area was holding and I didn't hear any breath sounds at all at first. I had him take a deep breath, which he was in so much pain, but i needed him to do. I still didn't hear anything. I moved to his side. Right side fine. Compared to his left, and heard nothing. I tried one last time listening to his back. Again, right side fine, and heard nothing on the left. Bryan had originally thought his lungs sounded fine. So I called him back over, because I saw this getting worse in a hurry. Sure enough, Bryan also could no longer hear breath sounds in the lower part of his left lung. We had to conclude that he had broken a rib and that rib had popped his lung, causing a pneumothorax. This kind of sucked. The nearest hospital as I mentioned earlier is an hour and a half from here. We could not do a chest tube, because there are no means to keep him alive for an hour and a half on the terrible roads to get to a hospital. We told him to leave as soon as they could and that he needed to be treated right away. I instructed him in my best spanish how we could keep the most pressure off of it during the ride. I can only hope that they took our advice and went to the hospital. We likely won't ever know, but he sure needed to. It felt so great, to use the exam skills I had learned, determine what was going on, and then it was maybe the worst feeling you could have as a clinician, telling someone they need to go an hour and a half and you have no means to help them further. Sure gives you a pit in your stomach. I hope he got the help he needed. Day 5 So today we went out about an hour to another village this morning. It was a great village, entirely Spanish speaking. Communication was a breeze! Never thought I'd say that. We didn't even have translators with us! Go us! haha. Anyway, the people in this village were definitely the most beautiful of any village we have seen. All of the kids and families put on their very best clothes to come visit us today. They were so happy to have our service. Every single person in this village thanked us. It was really quite special. Another cool thing, everyone, I mean every single person, had shoes or sandals in this village!!! It was great. Sadly, they have a different type of worm to deal with, one that is food born, so we still saw lots and lots of worms. The good news is, what little worm medicine we had left, though it wasn't the one pill wonder, was good enough for everyone. For this type of worm, one pill even not the right kind, will work wonders! So everything worked out well. We saw 280 people today. A few peculiarities though. This village had numerous blind people. Something we have not seen at all in other villages. We did not really know what to attribute this too, but it was definitely strange. We also had a little girl who was about 2 years old and had Cerebral Palsy. There is certainly no treatments available to her, but she sure was the cutest thing you ever did see. She could speak, and couldn't move correctly when we examined her, but she sure loved imitating my smile. Whenever I smiled at her, she would immediately smile back. Whenever I made a different face at her, she'd imitate back. Enough to make anyone's day down here. The other thing is this. This village was in dire need of dental work. This isn't to say that other villages haven't been, everyone has very poor teeth, if they have them at all down here. Let’s start by this. Think back to a time you had any sort of pain in your mouth, tooth, anything. Then think of how quickly you got yourself to a dentist, or took an advil or something. Then think of when you had something serious in your mouth, say a cavity that was bothering you. Pretty hard to withstand that pain for any amount of time, so you'd see a dentist immediately right. Well the first lady we saw today, forget having a cavity, had a massive infection in her jaw, that had formed an abscess under her tooth. If you've never had one, like I'm sure many haven't, think of the pain of someone heating up a metal knife and sticking it in between your teeth, down into your gums. She had had this for not a day, not two days, but 10 years, she had been living like this. Luckily, Bryan is well trained at pulling teeth and doing oral surgery, so he had promised this village he would do that when we arrived. So that's what we did. We pulled her tooth. Imagine how much relief she must feel tonight, having medicine for her pain, antibiotics for any remaining infection, and most of all, not having that abscess or rotten tooth in her mouth anymore. She must be sleeping like a baby. Bryan took the time to teach us how to pull teeth today, and it was an amazing experience. I got to pull my first tooth as well. It was way more of a challenge than anyone might have anticipated. Teeth are in such bad condition here, it is totally normal to see someone with 5 maybe 6 teeth in their entire mouth. This guy had some, but many were rotting. One in particular had caused an abscess. I went to pull his tooth, and it crumbled into 4 pieces in my pliers. We had to remove some of his gums to really get at the root. After about 5 minutes of twisting in the searing heat today, I finally got it out. He of course was bleeding, but you probably will never ever see a bigger smile then the one he gave me. He must have thanked me 20 times, before he went back out in the fields to work. It was great. Bryan continued pulling teeth and doing oral surgery. He pulled an average of 5 teeth per person he saw. Two people needed 27 teeth pulled because they were rotten, another person 18, another person 12. Can you imagine getting that many pulled. They left with such great spirits knowing that they would no longer be in pain. Imagine how our attitudes would be if some dentist pulled 27 teeth out of our mouth. I don't think anyone would be smiling or thanking the dentist, that's for sure. Alot of people have expressed interest in donating shoes. There is one huge problem with that here. It has been tried and has failed miserably here, so no missions donate shoes at all even though there is a necessity. The reason being is that it hugely demasculinates the males of the village. When this happens, women think less of them and the villages literally lose the dependence on one another. Essentially it creates a wellfare system for the villages, and we all know how well welfare works when you take a look at the US. So instead of clothes, vitamins, over the counter medications, Tums (especially because not only does this help with their diet that has extensive amounts of Chiles, but has a ton of calcium for their bones), pain killers, or antibiotics (whether expired or not), go a long ways to helping any problems that may exist here. One last bright spot on how big a deal vitamins are. Bryan went to a village last year to do a clinic, that was near the one we went to today. The children he said were the closest to mentally challenged as you can be. Less than 2% of anyone in the village could read or write. He dropped off an extensive vitamin regimen for everyone in the village. And he made sure they knew of the instructions on how to take them. Here they take vitamins every other day. The reason being, if Guatemalans ingested more than this, they would just pee them out, because they are not used to the nutrients. So after completing the clinic and leaving the vitamins behind, he came back this year to check in. Well you wouldn't believe it if you couldn't see if for themselves. In one year, that village now has the highest test scores at every grade level than any other Mayan tribe in the Rio Dulce river valley. How incredible is that, after only one vitamin every other day. Simply amazing. We restocked as per usual in the afternoon, then I got the pleasure of cooking dinner with Elsie. I got to make homemade salsa (she let me in on her secret recipe!) So I made that, then helped shred chicken. She made her famous empanadas. They were phenomenal. We are stuffed. Now for a movie on the projector, then our last clinic in the morning! What a week it has been!

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