6:30 wake up call. Our kitchen isn’t set up yet, so we went down the street to a local eatery. Nice food: coffee, banana-mango smoothies, eggs, beans, homemade bread. All you can eat, $6 a piece, a great way to start our adventure. 45 minute drive in our half-school bus, pictures later, and we arrive at our clinic location for the next three days.
We have worked in “clinics” before, and they are little more than a somewhat freshly painted block building, half abandoned. This was a mini-hospital. Probably 10,000 square feet, multiple treatment rooms, and emergency room, maternity ward. A couple of local docs seeing patients……and a dental suite. A nice dental unit and chair, but does it work, NO. Jim Gearing and I spent almost two hours trouble shooting the dental unit, got the patient light, water and compressed air going, couldn’t get the suction to turn on. So….I ended up using their compressor attached to our portable dental unit. Luckily I brought enough fittings to jury rig the conversion. And away we went. Sorta.
By the time we got the facility scoped out, choosing a room for extractions and another on the other side of the building in the dental suite for fillings, we really didn’t start seeing patients till after 11. And, most people who had queued up when we got there at 9, had left! We discovered that the Mayans question your integrity if you say one thing, (they were told we would be there at 8) and do another. Not a good start!
We ended up seeing about 20 patients. Not a personal best, by any means, but we did get the ball rolling. Now the providers: Five, non having done mission dental work before except Gloria and me. More on that tomorrow!
This is an unusual setting. A doctor assisting a doctor! Details tomorrow.
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