After our day of recovery and planning on Sunday, we fell asleep to raindrops falling on the hotel roof and grabbed some precious shut-eye before our early get up on Monday morning to set-up and prepare for our first day of medical clinic.  It rained that night, as I mentioned before…and in fact, I think it rained every night or at some point during the day during our time there.  But when we woke up on Monday, it had stopped raining, and I got a neat picture of what the hight altitude precipitation produced.

That’s right…we had some beautiful snow covered mountains.  Anyway, we met early at 6:30 for a devotional then had breakfast which consisted of eggs, corn flakes with the crazy good strawberry yogurt to pour on top, and my favorite…Guanabana juice!  Oh, there also was bread and jelly.  After that we met by the entry way and loaded our gear and ourselves into two vehicles and drove off into the mountains to a small village town outside of Ibarra, called Chirihuasi.  This is a small, poor, agrarian village made up of mainly Quichua Indians.  We arrived at a little church and set up shop.  We set up rooms of tarps which served as examination rooms, the pharmacy, the waiting area, and the eye clinic.  By about 8:15 we were ready to go.  Here’s some pictures!

This is what the clinic looked like in Chirihuasi.  We are actually in the sanctuary of the church.  The tarp exam rooms are off to the right and the picture is taken from the pharmacy looking over the waiting room.

A cute young Quichua girl

This picture shows the line to get into the clinic waiting room.  When we arrived people were already waiting and we saw patients until like 5:30.

This picture is actually from the place we went on Tuesday which was Atuntaqui, but it shows what the exam room kind of looks like.

  People waiting patiently, and I mean patiently for the doctors in Chirihuasi

That wraps up the first day.  It was a long day and we saw a ton of patients and shared the gospel with many many people.  After the clinic, we broke down all of the tarps, packed up our gear, went back to the hotel, repacked for the next morning, went to sleep and started all over again.  But this time (Tuesday) we went to a small suburb of Ibarra called Atuntaqui.  There was not really a church to set up all of our stuff in Atuntaqui, so we were kind of in the community center building.  The routine was the same so I won’t repeat it.  You can just enjoy some pictures from that clinic day!

Our humble little treatment table in Atuntaqui on which I did physical therapy.  Hopefully I can post some pictures of me working later.  Other team members of some of those pictures.

So as promised, proof that I was doing work!

This lady was hilarious.  She thought Brandon and myself were the most beautiful people on earth.  But she was really nice and a great patient.

That sums up the first too clinic days…I’ll tell you about the other 2 remaining clinic days tomorrow so stay tuned!