Dia de los diabeticos!

Not Dia de los muertos..

This morning was our first clinic day, unless I can count our last night´s late call to the hotel where we stay asking if we were "the nurses" and could we come help another foreign volunteer with her suspicious and menacing mozzie bites. I brought my first aid goods, including not the norm stuff like a vial of chloroprep and of course my arnica and calendula homeopathics. This poor girls' wounds made me want to become a fan of DEET. They were boiling, exploading, oozing and inflamming a decent surface area.

Anyway, this morning at 6am we were up and whoever wanted--all of us--trekked to the clinica where Jesus-Antonio consults with the local Type 2's. We did many a manual blood pressure check and when the physician came out to tell the remainder handful of folks that he couldn't see anymore of them because they had just run out of test strips, I interrupted and supplied my own. There were maybe 5 or 6 people left, and they had been waiting for hours. I can't sustain another diabetic clinic with my own supply, but I was glad that I had a match with so many different kinds of machines and strips out there.

¡Me encanta hablando Español! It was so fun to speak to everyone today, I got real friendly and chatty. It feels great to be back in a Spanish speaking country, my limited Spanish goes incredibly further than my Thai, Indonesian, or Kiswahili!! Now however, I'm going to try to pick up some Kaqchikel, the local Maya dialect.

San Lucas Toliman on the Lake of Atitlan in southern Guatemala is one of the most beauitful lakeside mountain villages I have seen. Food served by the old Father from Minnesota who has lived here for 45 years is not so good. I'm going to sneak some rice and beans and tortillas instead.