Thursday – Day 4

Haha, this is a candid shot w/ my dear friend and pharmacy student Chris.

My job at the clinic entails banding the patients outside in line with purple and gray hospital bands. The rest of my day, I am running between stations at the clinic ensuring that all of my team is satisfied and guarding traffic flow at the main gate.

This is unfortunate because I rarely get to see the end product of our clinic: satisfied and happy patients who have just received medical and spiritual care.

However, today we were banding people and a man arrived at the back of the line. He insisted that he did not want to see a doctor (purple band) and only wanted eye glasses (gray band). So, we gave him a gray band and let him go ahead in the clinic in front of all the people because all he needed were glasses whereas they all needed to see a doctor.

Only about fifteen minutes later, he came out in his greased up coveralls smiling from ear to ear and telling us, “Gracias” for the glasses. Then he crossed the street, caught a bus, and headed off to work.

It got me REALLY excited to be able to immediately see how we had helped this man. Normally, people wait in line and don’t leave the clinic until several hours later. This man, however, was able to receive the care he needed in only about 15 minutes and was still able to go to work today.

Gloria Dios!

Wednesday – Day 3

Today we were in Triniteria.

Today had a different feel to it than the previous two days. On Monday, we were forced to run a short clinic so we didn’t see as many people as we’d like to. On Tuesday, we were trying to make up for Monday’s short day by working extremely hard on very little sleep. And then came today; Wednesday.

I had spoken to several people on my team on separate occasions about the lack of a spiritual attitude in our clinic. Sure we were seeing more people than we had planned on and that was great, but were we pushing back darkness?

So today, now that we are somewhat rested, and our numbers were back on track, we wanted to slow down our pace and pray for the people we treated. We made it a point to pray for every patient that we saw. Patients were prayed for by the doctor, nurse, translator, pharmacist, and eye tech’s. We wanted to push back darkness with the Light of Christ. And the strangest thing happened…

Philippians 1 is correct when it says that multiple people laboring diligently in the gospel begin to work in a unity of mind and spirit that is supernatural. Our team grew today. We didn’t grow in number, we grew in depth. When we wanted to focus on praying over our patients, it was truly for their good – not ours. However, Philippians 1 IS true! As we prayed and labored in our clinic today, we began to form and mesh into not a team of 20 individuals but to one team with one mind, one spirit, and one purpose: showing and proclaiming the gospel to those in need.

I am stoked to see what God allows us to be a part of tomorrow!