El Salvador Mission Trip 2012 - Part 1

From January 20 to 29, 2012, a group of 56 people, including 4 doctors, 1 dentist, 7 nurses and others travelled from Marshfield, WI to El Salvador to work, pray, love, repair and build. In 4 days, we visited 4 different underserved sites in the country and delivered medical care to 800 people. Here are some pictures from that trip.



On medical missions, if you'll need it, take it with you!



Every morning, we'd have breakfast at 6:30 am. About an hour later, we would load our two buses with people and equipment. Pretty tight fit! Most of our trips involved 2 to 4 hours of bus travel each way to the places we worked at.

To get to some destinations, it was necessary to transfer everything to smaller pickup trucks.



Sometimes, the roads were too narrow for a bus, so we'd transfer everything to small pickup trucks and go the rest of the way



Let's make bubbles!

 



We had a lot of fun and I think, got back more than we gave. Here is one of our high school volunteers (Olivia Heegeman) teaching a little girl how to blow bubbles.






Blowing bubbles is fun!

 

It worked! Laughter is free.



removing an infected ingrown toenail

One of doctors -- Princy Ghera-- was a Med-Peds resident from our (Marshfield Clinic's) combined residency program in internal medicine and pediatrics. She finishes her residency this June and is going on to become a pediatric pulmonologist. Here she is removing an infected ingrown toenail while I looked on.



Here's the patient (mom) holding onto her daughte for comfort.



Interestingly, while she worked on the patient's toe, the patient, a mom, held tightly onto her daughter, while the second one looked curiously at me trying to comfort her. Usually mothers comfort their children during medical procedures. But who says the roles cannot be reversed?

Our team purposely went to the poorer parts of the country. Our goal was to provide free medical care and services to those without access.



Some of the houses nearby where we worked