Month One

It has been almost one month since we all arrived at the Farm and much has changed within me already. All the newby´s have their jobs and have been shadowing mostly over the last two weeks or so. My full time job is being the nurse in the clinic, while my small jobs include: study hour (helping one of the houses two hours a week on school work), PAVI (a work program for the adolescents which I can kind of self design, I hope to do a lot of gardening with them), and Personel Committee (we review applications of volunteers plan retreats and orientations). I am very excited for all of these.


I have had two weeks in the clinic now and have seen quite a bit, everything from pregnant women to colds, to skin infections, to machette cuts to complet fingers cut off (yes that is right, we brought him into the ER, it was a close one too he had lost a lot of blood). Last week with a 24hour period we have taking four trips into Trujillo for emergencies and other clinic related work! I also had my first solo "emergencia" on the Farm; a patient we had seen before with asthma needed another neb treatment, and Beth the other nurse was in town, so I was the nurse. The mother of the child was asking for Beth and wasn´t sure I could do it. But then when she came back the next during clinic hours she was including me in her explanations instead of soley Beth as she had done before. Things here takes lots of time and having the neighbors feel comfortable with me is no exception.

I am part of the Thanksgiving committee which means I help decide what we want to cook and then how we are going to cook. We do not have ovens here like we do in the states. We have a fagon which is an outdoor sloid stove top like a big grittle, as well as a clay oven, which is extremely difficult and frustrating and time consuming to cook with. So I am interested to see how it will all go down. I guess Thanksgiving is a pretty big deal to the vols here and is an amazing day filled with food and american football, which I heard is amusing since the kids here know futbol or as we call it soccer.

Lately I have been missing home and actually have thought it would be nice to be in school right now! The weather here is getting to me. Yesterday and the day before I literally let the sweat drip off my face all afternoon while Beth and I did inventory in the Clinic! I don´t know what I will do when it actually gets hot-now it is rainy season aka winter so it is "cold".....

Thank you again to all those who actually read this and are praying for us all. I literally do pray for you all everyday in chapel at 6am!

Much love for the Farm,
Deirdre

What we need....

I know it is quite early to be thinking about Christmas, but the Farm could use any and all help. I know most people like to do the giving tree at Church but I would ask you all to think about giving instead to the Farm. We have 38 kids from the ages of 4 to 18, and all of their needs are provided solely through donations. The school also uses up their supplies of notebooks and pens very quickly. I will have more specific information coming later but I would like you all to start praying about it.That is all for now, TQM (Te Quiero mucho: I love you much!)

The Finca

I made it safe and sound with the rest of my crew! It is absolutely beautiful here and everyone has been really welcoming. I have been able to see the clinic and already go to the hospital with a young girl who reopened a pretty deep cut on her knee, hiked up the mountain for some Blood pressure and blood glucose checks, and filled some medications for some patients in the clinic. I am learning a lot about my self during these first two weeks of orientation. I go to bed each night in my room with 4 other girls listening to the ocean waves and watching the geckos eat the bugs on the walls! The food here is wonderful and I can tell I will really miss it when I return home. My spanish is being challenged as well as a lot of my views about where I come from what I have been taught about others and how I view myself in comparison. It is quite humbling actually. Right now I am living with about 30 people in the house which in two months will decrease to 16 or 18. Then I will be on my own. So please pray for me and the others as we need to have very steep learning curves in the next several weeks. Thank you for all your prayers so far it is really evident how God has been working and moving here everyday! Much love to the States from Honduras!