It is at
about 4:00am when the deep sleep really kicks in here. Finally my body warms up
to a temperature that is acceptable to sleep at, and the blankets feel
incredibly cozy. This is why it took my host mom quite some time banging on the
door to wake me up at 4:30am on a Sunday morning.
‘Madeline, Madeline’ she hollered
and finally getting no response she went ahead and turned the key to open the
door. Thinking that it was a murderer coming in I jumped up and looked over as
my host mom entered aglow by the light of her cell phone.
“Madeline the nurse needs you to go
to Collacruz to help someone give light” “Give what?” I asked still not quite
present in the moment.
“Have a baby” my host mom clarified
with actions included. Turns out there was only one nurse in town that night,
the rest were in the regional capital and this nurse did not want to walk to
the nearby town by herself. Well I was honored to be second on call, and I do
want to see a birth while I am here, but my dreams were so sweet at that moment
and I had a big day ahead of me, (I was taking the community on a field trip,
packed lunches and everything)! Nonetheless my good heart got the better of me
and I put on as many clothes as I could fit and headed out the door.
I found the
nurse in the health post frantically putting things in a bag. At this moment I
realized I needed to pee, but I didn’t want to waste any time for we had a 15
minute hike ahead of us, and their was a mama out there in pain needing our
help…So I held it and waited for the nurse to get ready. Once out the door the
nurse informed me that in fact the mother has already given birth, which lessoned
my excitement, and made me think twice about my decision not to pee. As we passed
by the short cut I made the executive decision to not take the small foot path
through the farms and instead stick to the main road at this time of night, so
we sped walked onward and upward with a slight pant in our breaths. Adrenaline
got the best of me and put the umph that we needed into my power walk. Finally
we arrived at the start of the town, then headed down to the lower part of the
town, and then walked down where the foot path short cut comes out, turns out
the family is the one house that is a bit of a ways down back towards my town
on the foot path. Clearly I should not be the one to make decisions in
emergency situations for my priorities are to avoid the non-existent scary
animals in the farms rather than rush to the person in pain.
We arrived
gracefully to the house and found the mother on the bed with a sound asleep 2
year old beside her, and four other kids ranging from ages 3 to 11 on the bed
near by. Another neighbor was there as support as well as the grandmother with
a sack of blankets in her arms. Clearly this mother was experienced in the
childbearing area. The sack of blankets turned out to be the healthy little
nugget, and I sat close by that new life as the nurse tended to the
mother. My nursing assistant skills are
something to be desired, for I was not very smooth at recording the numbers the
nurse gave me and the correct letters that go with them. Turns out they don’t
use HR for heart rate in Spanish. I
assisted in some other nontechnical areas such as connecting the tube of the IV
to the needle that went into the vein, but mostly I just looked at the newborn
baby. After an hour the nurse finished
up the preliminary tasks that she had to do, and needed to go back to the
health post to get an injection for the mother. We packed up our things and off
we went. Light was just starting to fill up the sky so we boldly took the footpath
back. Once back in town we found a car that was willing to take the nurse back
to the house and I left her so I could prepare a cup of coffee in the hour I
had before my field trip began.
I had been
planning this field trip for the last couple of months and for various reasons
it kept getting pushed back. Finally we were able to set a date for the end of
September and the municipality provided us with transportation. I invited
several of my students to come, members of the municipality, the president of
the Ronda (the security force in town), and the governor. Then I found out that
we were going to be taking the large cow truck that the town owns, and we had
plenty of space for all, so I started to invite everyone. I was nervous that
people wouldn’t actually show up on the Sunday, or the municipality would
forget so as I walked down to the plaza that day with my belly full of coffee,
my stomach was turning circles in anticipation. Much to my relief people were
mulling around waiting, the town truck was revving up and it looked like we
were going to get a good crowd. In total
we had 17 people loaded up in the truck and off we went down the back roads. We
headed down in to the valley and up the other side of the mountain ranges into
a town called Santo Tomas. There is a water and sanitation volunteer in Santo
Tomas who greeted us as we came roaring into town. He and his host brother
showed us around the biodigestor that they have in their farm. This biodigestor
is a large tube that you put excrement of cows, guinnea pigs, horses, pigs, any
animal really and it turns it into methane gas to cook with. It also produces
liquid fertilizer that they can spray on their plants instead of insecticide,
as well as solid fertilizer to use as compost. It is a pretty sweet system and
I am hoping to install one in our school this coming year. The tour was
incredibly informative, I told my students that whoever asked the most
questions would win a chocolate bar and with this motivation we had a very engaging
tour. Upon arriving home I was exhausted from the day’s events but extremely
motivated by this project
This past
Monday my students and I presented our trip to the teachers and director of the
school who all seemed excited and enthusiastic about the potential for this
project. So there it is some of my days
are filled with desperation for more activities to do, while others fill
themselves up to the brim un-expectantly.
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