India- Medical Clinics

We spent 6 days doing medical clinics in 6 different villages.  Each day was run the same way, so here's the rundown!
5:30am wake up.  6am breakfast.  6:45am ready for the bus, load meds, bus pulls out at 7am.  We travelled between 2- 2.5 hours by bus to the village, using the time to listen to worship music (and possibly have a nap!). I thought I would be able to read and journal on the bus, but sadly motion sickness got the best of me if I tried!
In order to get to the villages we had to drive to a junction point where the roads branched out.  It was the only way to access them.  At the junction, we found out, police training was taking place.  This meant that we had to wait sometimes up to 25 min. until we could get onto the road we needed to complete our journey.  Sometimes we would use that time to worship together, some needed emergency bathroom breaks, other times we just waited patiently. 
Upon arrival in the village, this is what greeted us:

Notice the drum, the noise makers? And what you cannot see are the fireworks.  Yes, this group of Vijay's team greeted us and we followed them through the village with noisemakers, fireworks, cherry bombs and all, to where the medical camp tent was set up.  :D  It was so fun, we got better at waving at people as they came out of their homes to see what all the fuss was about, feeling like quiet the celebrities, Indian style! lol.  I did feel a bit sorry for the cows and chickens who had to endure the banging of the fireworks.

We arrived at the clinic, and this is what it would look like:





On the left is the intake waiting area.  3 of our team and 3 interpreters would take down information such as name, age, and what they needed care for.  Next came deworming, then a short wait to see a nurse.  The nurses tables were along the full back part of the tent.  One or two of us would be runners, taking patients to an available nurse, and taking finished patients to the pharmacy waiting area (front right side).  So we had 4 people working in the pharmacy, 6 nurses with interpreters working in the back, and a few of the prayer team praying for people in the waiting areas.  Others on the prayer team would walk around the village asking people if they needed prayer for anything.  Many would just approach us and ask for prayer!  We saw so many healings just on these prayer walks! (more on healings to come in next posting)


Let me back up a bit. Once we had arrived at the clinic, the women then formed a LONG line and followed some kind soul to a bathroom.  We prayed to see something like this:

squatter!! lol

but what we often got was this:

Looks like a cement room, right?  Well, it is. And you can't quite see it in this picture, but in the top left hand corner (which is the floor of the room) there is a small hole for drainage.  And a little bucket of water to wash things clean.  Now, you just TRY and do this without the splatter effect! lol. Enough said.


After the bathroom break we would meet for worship and prayer as a team for a few minutes, then get organized and open the clinic by about 10:30am.  We took a lunch break in shifts around 1pm, then closed intake by 2:30 so we could be done by 3pm.  In that time we saw anywhere from about 280 people to 320!  We worked like a well-oiled machine! :)  Our team and Vijay's guys who were interpreting, setting up and tearing down, worked so hard and everything went so smoothly.  It really was a wonder to see!


Not all of the jobs are medical, as I have mentioned.  Other than the 6 nurses we had 6 on intake, 4 on deworming, 2 runners, 4 in pharmacy, 2 on crowd control, 2 on kids ministry, and the remainder on prayer!  I had the priviledge of doing kids ministry on 3 of the 6 days :)  We colored, painted arms (they didn't want their faces painted- no mirrors!), blew bubbles, played frisbee, relay games, sang songs with actions, and had a ton of fun!

coloring time!

the finished products..notice the black hair in their pictures? :)

bubbles!!

The other three days I worked on intake (which I loved b/c it was a sit-down job!), deworming and as a runner.  It felt so good to be part of this amazing team working so hard to serve the people in the villages!

Our awesome interpreters

more bubble fun!