Laura and Friends

Last Thursday Laura Grabau, a UK student who is studying in Quito for the semester, came to Santo Domingo with three other US college students to volunteer at the clinic and CRN during their spring break. The Hombro clinic was closed for Good Friday, so the six of us gave the reception and waiting area a new coat of paint and some of the girls got started on setting up a better filing system for patient charts. By the time the students leave tomorrow this latter job will be complete - a huge accomplishment which would have taken the staff weeks or months to get done. The picture shows Rich and the workers after the painting was finished, all holding their "good patient" award stickers. Laura is furthest on the left.

We took the group out to the Tsachila festival (previous post) and to the Easter vigil service at the Agnus Dei monastic community, a liturgy beginning with the traditional fire at 3:30 a.m.(!) None of the girls is Catholic, but they will never forget this Easter, I am sure.

Tsachila Indians

The Tsachilas, a community of Colorado Indians (from whom Santo Domingo de los Colorados got its name), had their annual festival this past weekend in Chiguilpe, a pueblo on the outskirts of the city. The Hombro clinic may start sending a medical team out to the community, whose people are among the poorest of the poor here. Rich and I took the bus out with our four house guests and spent a few hours sampling the food (we took a pass on the grilled grubs, though a couple of the college girls tried them), looking at handicrafts made from seeds and wood and cotton, and watching the entertainment - music and dancing and a drama about global warming....a sad irony that this society which has left no footprint at all on the earth should have to be concerned about this travesty. The pictures above are of two Tsachila girls, two American men (Rich and Trent Blair, a Peace Corps volunteer from South Dakota who has been working with the Tsachilas) and a group competing for "best dressed Tsachila". Their red hats are actually their hair, which they coat with a substance made from the red achiote seed.

Follow ups

Here's a new picture of Luis, taken last week, a little more than two weeks after the picture I posted last week. He has made great progress, though he still has a ways to go. This week, due to school matriculation for the older kids and the Holy Week holiday, Lucia is not at the Center.

Rich and Corrinne requested a follow-up on Daisy. I'm sorry to say that I don't have any recent info about her. We went back to the family home several weeks ago to check on her; she had gotten bigger and looked very different, but we didn't have a scale so I don't know what she weighed, and the mother has not brought her back to the clinic to be re-weighed. In spite of the social worker's threatening to remove the child from the home if the mother didn't bring the baby in, the fact is that it's a terrible burden on this mother to come back with any regularity--more than a two-hour bus ride each way at a total cost of $5, which the family can ill afford, plus five other children at home. One of these days the social worker will go back out.

Lucia y Luis

For the last two weeks I have been helping out with Luis, a now three-month-old baby who weighed about four pounds when he was born and hardly gained a thing in his first month at home. So he spent 3 weeks in the hospital and then came to CRN. When I first met his mother she was sitting on the edge of the bed with tears running down her cheeks, despondent over her situation - missing her other children who were at home, the house she shares with a sister and brother-in-law and their children. She said that her sister doesn't love her (Lucia's) children, and the father of the baby "se fue" (is gone, presumably for good); she obviously was feeling hopeless. I took a picture during the first week. You might be able to see Luis's fuzzy forehead. This black fuzz is a common sign of malnutrition. (Sorry about the orientation; I should have posted it vertically but I can't change it.)

Now the fuzz has almost disappeared. Luis is still terribly floppy, but his eyes are bright and he's begun to make baby sounds and follow my keys when I move them across his field of vision. And he's got a smile like a jack-o-lantern!! His mother's spirits have changed completely, so much so that it's obvious she was suffering from severe depression. I'm working on a follow-up picture to post.