Sabbath, September 11, 2010

Today was our first Sabbath in Pagudpud. It was a tough day…I am still very homesick and all the reminders of home that come with Sabbath didn’t help. I played piano for a song in church today, with Emily on the guitar and everyone else singing…interesting…I never would have done that at home! Still no doctor…it looks like we won’t have one solid until January probably. Until then, hopefully we will have subs that come for a few days a week. We are supposed to focus on mission work until then. This will be hard, because there isn’t a good way to stay completely busy by just doing mission work. The only thing we can do is visitations to the local people. We meet with the pastor of the church, Mark Montero, tomorrow to figure out how we should spend our time. Our caretakers are the Riveral family—Rizal gets paid by IHSA to upkeep the church and provide what the student missionaries need. His wife Noemi has been cooking for us; starting Monday she will only cook lunch for us. They have three girls and a boy, I think…I haven’t figured out their family entirely yet. The oldest is Rhea (pronounced Ria). She is my age, 20, and just graduated from college with an education degree. She is nice to have around because she speaks fairly good English and is a good translator for us during outings. The two other girls are Collette and Fiona. Fiona is adopted.

Today we got our first taste of what a medical clinic might be like. A little girl got run over by a bus about a month ago. She just recently got let out of the hospital, but they let her out before her wound was barely healed. I walked into the little one-room clinic and I am sure my jaw almost dropped—her leg was completely raw flesh from the knee down. It was totally exposed muscle and fat, I couldn’t even see where any skin might be left. Her foot was swollen and had cuts and bruises. She needs a skin graft, but those are expensive and might not even be possible without going all the way to Manila. Dr. Mitzelfelt (Jay Coon’s father-in-law and the doctor who will probably be back in January to run the clinic) and some others poured Hydrogen Perioxide over the entire thing and then bandaged it up. After that, they let the dressing dry and then pulled it off to let it bleed and pull off the excess tissue to clean the wound better. Apparently it’s a lot better from what it was…there were maggots in the wound when Dr. Mitz saw the girl a few days before. The girl (7 years old) cried and cried but it was her mother and father who I really felt sorry for…her mother looked tired and drained. The bus company will not pay for the hospital bills because they said the mother must have been negligent if her daughter ran into the road. I think the father used up most of his money trying to get treatment for her. Her ear was also injured, and was sewn together when she was in the hospital so now her ear can’t drain and she can’t hear out of it very well. I hope they can get decent treatment for it.

Please keep me in your prayers. The homesickness and culture shock feels almost unbearable.