2000 Bolivian Mission Journal

We are developing partners here in Montero that allows our missions to continue even when we are gone. Rotary Club is becoming our biggest partner. There are several doctors in the club, so the medical part of the mission is helped by there participation. We brought complete blood analysis machines and chemistry analyzers this year. When presented, the Rotary president, who is a woman, put Rotary stickers on all the equipment although they had little to do with the donations. I had no problem with that. Perhaps they will help with the maintenance of the equipment. When they used the machine for the first time, the director of the lab said that he could now fire most of the employees. There was a nervous laugh from the staff. Eugenia and Frank spent the whole winter translating the manuals into Spanish. No small feat.

The EKG machines were received with some suspicion. We went to the surgical floor to find a “normal” patient so I could show them how to do the exam and for the doctors to see a normal EKG. We did ten EKG’s and none were normal, so I had a volunteer intern take the exam and fortunately it was normal. I gave lectures on reading EKG’s in Spanish the whole week, and the best score was 75%. Perhaps I am not a very good teacher, especially in Spanish. We gave out prizes to the top five students to encourage them to study. We also gave CPR lessons to the staff including the teachers who had no experience in that. We also brought monitors and a defibrillator. In Bolivia, when you are dead, you are dead. Bringing a person back to live was a bit foreign to them here. Bryant Hendricks and Karen are nurses. Karen is the CPR teacher at the hospital and they worked the whole time with the staff with dummies donated by the county. These will stay here so they can practice during the year. Even the nurses learned intubations and shocking. Nurses are not allowed to do much here as opposed to the US. They are very interested and happy to learn new skills. Since the doctors are not in the hospital all the time, the nurses need to learn these skills.

George Schmitt, James Neil, Steve Hott, Dennis Wilson and Dennis Mathews were busy building four houses, costing about $2500 each, while Elaine Reynolds, Sara Marshall and Mary Heffington continued the sewing lessons and went to an older girls’ orphanage where a fashion show was given to the group the day before we left showing their new clothes. Carl Lindquist, our Methodist minister did vespers and began the evangelical aspect of the mission for the first time. Many other missions come to this area, but few do as many different things as we do.

There are patients here that the best medical care in the world can’t help. We saw a beautiful young girl with spinal muscular atrophy. This disease affects the same cells in the spinal cord that polio does, but the disease is progressive and ultimately fatal. Another had leukemia, and died a few months after we left. I had hoped that the Make A Wish Foundation could take him to Disney World, but he was too ill to make the trip.

God is moving our mission into many areas I never could have imagined three years ago. It is easy to see His hand at work here in this poor country. We have too many distractions in our world to see how God really works. It is nice to be here and feel God’s presence. We came to give, but we all feel like we got more than we gave. We brought three packets of Alcoholics Anonymous material in Spanish. When we were in a shop in Santa Cruz, the owner of the shop asked if we had any such material. A strange question, you might think, if God had not told her to ask a strange group of people. Another we left at a drug and alcohol rehab facility which had no idea such an organization like AA even existed, and the third we left with a missionary doctor we met the last night when we gave a slide show of the Holy Land at the big girls’ orphanage. He was working in a community in the jungle where there was a horrible problem with drinking. God knew all along that these three places needed this material. Not two or four packages. Just the three we brought. And we were wondering where the last one would go, and worrying that we might have to bring it back home with us. “Oh, ye of little faith!”