A Day in the Life... of a SHe Polochic Clinic

Oh, the Places You'll Go... and the merit badges that you'll earn. I could fill up a whole little Miss USA sash thingy with the number of Polochic merit badges that I definitely am now skilled at. Those would include things like....

• Cement Mixing
• Rock Excavating
• Rebar Bending
• Cinder Block Hauling
• Boulder Moving
• Clay Chunk Flinging
• Rock Breaking
• Trench Digging
• Child Labor Organizing
• .... and the list could go on and on

I'm not kidding. A whole sash thing. Filled. Just spend a week in the Polochic on a humanitarian trip, and you will too. And those only covered the building projects I worked on.

I also have merit badges in...

• Finger Pricking
• Equipment Fixing
• Dental Tool Sterilizing
• Dental Assisting
• and.... Fake Dental Extractions

So, I was going to save this picture for last, but I couldn't. I really wanted it up front.

I also spent one day in the medical and dental clinic after begging and pleading with Tyler, one of the ER docs who organized the whole trip. They were limiting the number of people who could go to the clinic but a few batted eyelashes and.... voila... I was in for a day. Of course, since I'm not clinically trained (unfortunately sitting at a desk working for a health insurance company doesn't count), there wasn't a ton that I could do. However, I spent the morning doing hemoglobin testing on pregnant girls (and there were a ton of them!) until the little machine broke for good after resurrecting it a few times from the dead.

So, to make myself useful, I helped out in the dental clinic too. Quite the experience. Watching a tooth being yanked out was a little unnerving at first. And it was a little gross to see bloody teeth on the plates with the equipment that needed to be sterilized. I sterilized, I set up equipment, I helped out suctioning spit during dental cleanings, and I even apparently learned how to do fake extractions on myself.

Some how this post is already getting long, so I'll do a quick recap of the rest. The clinic was in Sajonte, the same town we were building the secondary school. Villagers were lined up to get seen long before we even got to the school to set up. No school that day since we took over the school for the clinic. Mostly dirt floors, had to keep kicking a dog out that was running around (it is all open with very few doors). If you were seen, the consultation was in a room with four or five other consultations going on at the same time. That day, Tyler removed a cyst from a little boy's head (see pic)... it was really cool to watch. The boy is just laying on some desks with a dirt floor underneath. The dental clinic had 3 folding tables for the patients to lay on. One was designated for teeth cleaning and the other two were for extractions. Mostly we did extractions. No fillings... you either get them cleaned or pulled depending on how bad they were.

It was fun, interesting, different... plus I got a whole new set of merit badges.