A Few Moments to Spare

The past few months have just flown by, but when I look back and try to remember everything that has happened I'm blown away! So I will break it down to bullets points.

The first week of October we hosted a team led by the future director of SIDR and his family. With them they brought a small team of doctors. I had the priviledge of driving them around to various locations where they ran clinics. One day Fernando (our SI doctor) told me that we'd be driving to a community really far away, and up a road that nobody else wants to drive. Well, me having a love for driving, welcomed the "road less traveled". Which I quickly discovered WHY it is the road NOBODY travels. We weren't exactly driving like this... (see below photo).

But we were driving like this... only up a mountain - through a dried up river bed... NOT to be confused with an actual road.




I had the time of my life... but I would be lying if I didn't tell you that there were one or two times where I thought... "there's just no way!"

The week following that team, we took our semester abroad students out for 1 week to Santo Domingo and the national park. This part of the program is to focus on history and culture. There are many highlights from this trip - basically the entire time! But possibly the scariest thing I have ever gone through in my entire life happened during this trip. One of the students participating in the program has a sever allergy to peanuts. She had been doing a great job with being careful but in a foreign country where packaged food doesn't necessarily give all the disclaimers can be dangerous... as we found out. One afternoon she had an allergic reaction to a cookie. We were 20 minutes outside the nearest town. She carries an epi-pen which buys her time to get to a hospital. We spent the following 2 hours rushing in and out of clinics (with medical personel attempting to help, but not with confidence) while trying to get back to the capitol where we could (should we still need it) receive better attention. Finally we were able to get the treatment we needed and she was in the clear. Meanwhile, while this was going on, we had another student who suddenly had food poisoning and was vomiting out the window all down the freeway! Crazy!

Shortly after we returned from that trip, my family arrived for some family-fun! My highlight from that trip was just sitting around playing games... "Catch Phrase" to be exact. We played boys vs. girls and the girls won almost every game!

Since my family has left we have been back to focusing just on the semester students. We have unfortunately had to cancel our trip to the Haitan border do to the cholera outreack and issues that have come about because of that - like the rioting, etc. But we're having an amazing time serving and ministering too the 15 students that are here.