Last night we celebrated by the sea with a dinner with some local students. One of our team members did a gofundme page to pay for several local students to continue their education. Several others have contributed regularly over the years, but we have not met them like this before with this particular first week team. In all, Partners for Medical Relief helps to sponsor over one hundred students through our teams and partners. It was impressive to talk with the students and hear their stories and have a meal with them. They have a lot of ambition and passion to better their lives. In Belize, education only goes through the 6th grade, unless you pay as a family to continue. Many cannot afford to do so, and that is where many of our volunteers have begun sponsoring a student at $350 per year.
Mingling with local students
Friday night dinner followed a successful day of counting pills and getting ready for the village clinics, as well as finding patients for surgery from two regional hospitals some 45 minutes apart from each other.
Pill counting by the sea
Today teams are split to construction to work on the home for the family of four, Xiabe Village Clinic, San Pablo Village Clinic, and Corozal Hospital Surgery. The Construction Team made great headway yesterday getting all four walls up. This morning they fought the soft rain and mud to get additional supplies and load it onto the site. By noon they were adding to the house in hopes of getting it under roof soon. The Hospital team arrived early, but the first day is always tough to get the anesthesia machines working and process the surgeries with any speed. The hope is that no patients will have to go home and start over tomorrow after a day of fasting for today’s planned surgery.
Xiebe Village is near the Hospital in the Corozal Region. The team arrived and found places to set up registration out of the rain, and nurses stations in the school, and doctors stations, and pharmacy. Another team was down the main road just across the border into the Orange Walk Region in a village called San Pablo. They were greeted by a huge crowd in the hurricane shelter. They had the shoo out the dogs who walk around indoors and outdoors before they could begin their work of seeing over a hundred patients. They also had a reading glasses station that was quite popular.
San Pablo Reader glasses
Ellie helping kids “Have a good day” in Xiabe Village classroom where they clinic is housed
The kids are all so precious here, we could take snap shots of them all day, with their big cute eyes and smiles. They have to hang out for most of the day, so we have a lot of ways to keep them distracted and entertained while awaiting their turn to see the doctor with their families.
Xiabie Registration on school property
Unloading truck of supplies at house
The breakfast devotions today focused on the riches of being able to serve in God’s field and accept his calling to come to Belize and try to bring His kingdom come and Do His will be done without wanting our light to shine on ourselves, but as Jesus said, that “they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”
Devotion in action