Team Johnson 843 – Day 2 in Totonicapán
Welcome back to our blog for day 2 of our trip. Today we gathered for our morning devotional at 6:45—a later hour than usual!—led by pastor Azariah Terrell. Though this is first time meeting anyone on the team, he explained that he felt he had known us for a long time because he was greeted with love, and this was the theme he focused on this morning.
He asked us to consider what it means to be called to serve, and explained that he sees the spirit or the soul as a continuous puzzle that is completed, piece by piece, every time that we give to others, and the source of servitude is love. He commended us for putting our egos and our daily concerns aside to come here and put our call to serve into action. His mom always says, “don’t talk about it, be about it,” and this is one of the reasons he was drawn to Faith in Practice, as a way to put faith and love into action.
After our devotional, we had breakfast and loaded our luggage onto two large buses for the drive to Totonicapán. This is a region in southwestern Guatemala with a high altitude of approximately 8,000 feet, so the climate can be much colder than elsewhere in the country where temperatures are typically quite hot. Many of us recall the last time Team Johnson visited Totonicapán in 2018 — patients and volunteers alike were fully bundled up and still felt cold! This area is also distinctive for its concentrated Mayan population, so we will have several Quechi intepreters available to translate into Spanish.
The drive from Antigua to our first clinic site took several hours, so trip leader Phil Johnson used some of the bus time to explain a bit more of the rich history of the area from the pre-Columbian era to the Spanish conquest to the 20th century. We will be hearing more in subsequent days, and could fill several more blogs with this fascinating information, but we’ll leave that to the experts and simply suggest that you learn more about this history when you have a chance.
In the early afternoon we drove up to our clinic site for the week, a large school with a central auditorium and classroom spaces spread behind it in a semicircle, each decorated with the flag and crest of a Central American country. After individual clinic leaders scoped out the best sites for them to set up, we proceeded with unloading the truck full of supplies for the next four days: tables, patient beds, privacy curtains, ultrasound and EKG machines, kitchen supplies, over 100 unassembled wheelchairs, other mobility devices like canes, and dozens of trunks packed with still more supplies like medications, examination gloves, and eye charts.
Fortunately, the local volunteers were on site to help us and they pitched in immediately with much of the heavy lifting. Within a few hours we had set up our makeshift clinics along with chairs for the triage area. A large group of local volunteers received their red FIP hats and received training from FIP staff on protocols for the week. The wheelchair assemblers also got to work and completed seven chairs by the time we left—a great head start for tomorrow morning!
After a nice sack lunch at the school where many of us enjoyed some unexpectedly warm sunshine, we drove about an hour into Quetzaltenango where our hotel is for the week. After unloading once more, we still had some work to attend to and gathered as a group to hear updates on referrals for further patient care and on Insight, our patient management platform. This is only our second year of using software for recording patient data, but it has apparently made a big difference already for our surgical teams that operate on patients we first see in the village clinics. We are joined again by a team of Insight experts who are here to help us troubleshoot any technical issues and keep the platform running smoothly.
Tonight we are off to bed early once more for an early rise tomorrow, but we are feeling prepared and excited to see patients—the real reason we are all here! Tune in again tomorrow to hear about our first day of clinical work.
Josie Johnson, Team Blogger/Photographer
