UPDATE FOR THE CONSTRUCTION-MINDED

by Dr. Katie Wolf

For those of you who enjoy following our construction progress, here are some photos from the past couple of weeks.  We have had a very dry summer here, which is not good for the crops, but is very good for our construction.  Rain makes it hard to get materials up to the site and for the workers to work, but, fortunately, the rain that has fallen has been mostly at night and the road is dry by the time the truck starts up the mountain.  We’re grateful for these signs of God’s grace!  Thanks for your prayers and wonderful support!

The stucco work on the pharmacy/lab/xray building is moving along quickly.  The inside of the building is finished, as is the front porch.  This week the masons are finishing up the two sides and back of the building and then it will be done!

The patient latrine was dug to a depth of 10 feet, after which a retaining wall was built to prevent collapse of the top of the hole.  Here are the rock walls being built:

In order to store water to flow down by gravity into the clinic buildings, we’re building a concrete reservoir or cistern on the side of the mountain above the clinic.  Here is the base of the reservoir, dug into the ground a few feet to stabilize the concrete slab that will be the floor:

Behind the storage depot is the hill on which the reservoir will sit.  When the initial excavation of the land was done using a borrowed backhoe and bulldozer, the mountain wasn’t cut back far enough to allow for drainage and prevention of erosion.  So, for the past few weeks, we’ve employed several strong, young men to cut back the mountain using pick-axes and shovels.  Here’s part of the wall that they’ve cut back:

 

AND, FOR THE MEDICALLY-MINDED

Last week, this little boy came into the clinic, holding a bloody rag to his face from a laceration he sustained in a fall.  He was changing his goat’s grazing location and tripped, falling onto a sharp rock on the ground.  Fortunately, his mother lives nearby and brought him quickly to the clinic to be seen.  Since it was a fresh laceration, we took time from our other patients to sew him up.  He was a model patient, never flinching with the local anesthetic injections or the sutures.  In fact, he slept through the whole procedure!  Here he is a week later, ready to have his sutures removed:

For those of you astute clinicians, I want to assure you that, in addition to fixing his laceration, we also treated his fungal scalp infection!

Every once in a while, we have the opportunity of attending activities at the government hospital in Jérémie.  A good friend of ours, Concepcia Pamphile, is the Assistant Medical Director of the hospital and she invited us to attend the dedication ceremony for a new Maternity Wing of the hospital.  This occasion also corresponded with the celebration of the hospital’s 90^th year of existence!  Attending the ceremony was the Minister of Health, who I was privileged to meet.