June 2016: "The Georges in Peru"

Today I went back to the sign-maker for the nth time (did you know 'nth' is a Scrabble word without vowels?) and thrilled to find him in the shop working.  Not only that, he said the plaque was finished!  He crawled up a narrow ladder to the storage area upstairs and I could hear him scuffling about.

They say humor doesn't translate well between cultures.  When you consider the different environments that people live in it is understandable that people from different cultures find different things entertaining.  There is an old joke about a man that took his shoes to the cobbler to be repaired.  He goes on to completely forget that he's taken the shoes in until years later he finds the claim ticket under his desk.

Today one of the local pastors and his wife were patients.  When they arrived, he asked, "How are your wife and kids?"  I was a bit surprised that he hadn't heard and probably made him feel bad for asking by my surprised look and terse answer that Amy had died of cancer.  But I went on to answer his question, "She's great!  Better than those of us still on earth, certainly."  If one thinks about it she's never been better!

Today our church had a faena.  A faena is a work day and today the job was to carry a load of bricks from the street down into the church property where we are going to build a wall.  

Five tons of bricks left on the street.  What if someone steals them?  Wasn't a problem.  Bricks are too much work to steal, I guess.

One of the benefits of starting to see more patients again is my diminishing food bill.  I don't charge my patients, but many bring food to show their gratitude.  I've gotten chickens, guinea pigs, huge sacks of corn and potatoes and lots of fruit.  Once a patient brought some Starbucks coffee!  Yesterday, a patient brought a papaya, mandarin oranges and some cheese he had made:

When I took on the role of SIM Peru director in 2010 many lamented that the number of gross medical stories and pictures plummeted.  I can't guarantee the same number or shock value of the photos, but you can expect to see more interesting stuff!  We'll start with an easy one:  Today, a woman, who has helped several of our missionaries in their ministries, came to get a hemangioma removed from her thumb.

Sunday, Mia got injured while going down a zip line at the home of some other missionaries.  Her pain made me think that she could have fractured her navicular bone in the foot, so yesterday we went and got an X-ray and sure enough, there is a little chip broken off of her navicular bone.  About fourteen years ago, a medical student, Anna Peek, from the UK, went with me on a couple of village trips.  She went on to become an orthopedic surgeon and graciously lets me consult with her about ortho cases that I have here in Peru.

I've written about Santiago before.  We've been meeting for bible study for a couple of years now.  We only met once this year before Amy started deteriorating, when we put our meetings on hold.  I called him this morning to see when he'd like to meet.  "Today!  At 1 pm!" Okay.  It was good to see him and see how he was doing and after our study in Matthew 1 (I let him pick the material) we were picking when we were going to meet again and he asked, "Can we meet twice a week?"  It's fun having people who are hungry to study God's Word!