A Day In The Life

Our GORGEOUS view of Mt Misty (a currently active volcano) from the living room window

So we realized that we’ve told you a lot of bits and pieces of what goes on throughout a normal clinic day but not the full story.  So let us just give you some quick tidbits of what our days looked like.

So lets start from the top:

5:15 am:  the most devoted of the bunch faithfully awoke to do either insanity, kickboxing, a run, or group fitness together.

6:00 am: the stragglers awoke just in time to eat breakfast at 6:30

6:30 am: delicious breakfast of drinkable yogurt, fruit, eggs, strawberry jelly, bread, avocado, and some sort of main dish like pancakes or banana bread (nothing too crazy but always delicious) 

7 am: short devotional and prayer time to get our day started right led by various members of the group

7:30 am: Go Time!  a bus picked us up and drove us to the clinic sight which was a school for the blind that graciously allowed us to invade several of their rooms with PT stuff and their entire courtyard with wheelchairs.  This bus ride included our own version of the ‘punch-buggy’ game.  This included yelling out food names by color according to the color ‘punch-buggy’ we saw.  It began as traditional punching but bruises got too numerous and too many taxi drivers were startled by our sudden outbursts to punch each other, haha.  

7:45am: prayer and singing with the translators and other pastoral and office staff helping out.  

8:00 am: 1^st patients arrived.  We were scheduled to see the patients in 1 hour time blocks, but our schedule often was thrown off because many patients had so many medical problems and information to talk about.  

12:00 pm:  Lunch Time!!!! Most of the time we didn’t end up eating until about 12:30 because most of us spent so much time with our patients! (it’s hard not to when the little kids are so cute).  One of the translators mom’s cooked our lunches for the whole crew.  

1:00 pm:  We began seeing patients again until 4:00.  Most times we didn’t get done until 5:00.  At the end of the day, we went through the clinic, picked up the mess we made throughout the day and said our daily goodbyes.  

5:00ish pm:  The bus came to pick us up to take us back to the orphanage where we were staying.  The drive to and from the clinic was pretty crazy because of the lack of stop signs.  Apparently the lines in the roads don’t mean anything and going through intersections is “at your own risk”.  Horns are used frequently here and when approaching intersections, one car beeps to say “I’m coming” and one car beeps to say “I’m not stopping”. 



Playing soccer with the kids from the orphanage

5:30-6:30 pm:  Relax for a little bit and talk about all the crazy things we saw while working with patients.  Most of us were all exhausted from the long, fun, crazy day and we usually just hung out in our little living room/dining room area.  If we had a little energy left, some of us would go down and play soccer with the little boys and girls from the orphanage. 



 

6:30 pm:  Dinner is served!! Dinner was cooked by various people.  It usually consisted of rice, chicken, potatoes, and vegetables.  They love their rice and potatoes here so we had plenty of these foods for lunch and dinner throughout the two weeks.  

7:00 pm:  After dinner, we usually had a “pow wow”.  During this time we usually discussed how our day went as well as what was in store for the week.  

Hanging out after dinner :-)

7:30 – 10 pm:  This is when we all hung out, played boggle, sang, laughed, watched funny youtube videos, updated our blog, looked at the thousand pictures from the day, created music with kitchen utensils, showered, and relaxed.  Usually the SRU crew ended up being the last people to go to bed and it wasn’t uncommon to have someone come out and tell us we were being loud!  

Becca & Courtney