A Typical Trip

Our trips to Nicaragua usually follow a similar schedule so generally we know what to expect to happen on each day. We begin the trip either on a Saturday or a Sunday with some of us leaving from the airport in Tulsa and some from Oklahoma City and meeting in Houston. In the past we've taken a flight just after lunch, but this year we got the early flight at 6:30 a.m., and we hope that will be our plan from now on. By leaving that early, we got to Managua before noon and had all afternoon to rest and get organized and get to bed early. When we leave after noon, we get to Managua around 9 p.m. and that makes a very short night.

Once we get through customs, we get on the BMDMI buses and travel about half an hour to the mission house which overlooks Lake Managua in a beautiful setting. That house is especially nice to come back to after the week in the field. We are up early the second morning, and if it is a Sunday, we have our own worship service before getting on the buses again to travel to our assigned village. So far our team has never gone to the same place twice. Usually we have the use of the local school for the week so once we arrive the captain and the department heads scout out the layout of the school classrooms and determine the best setup for the clinics to make a good traffic flow. Then the hard work starts. All of our supplies have already been delivered and are waiting in one area. Now they have to be sorted out to the individual clinic areas. This past year that meant that over 700 boxes had to be moved. We were lucky in that our huge mountain of beans and rice was already in the right place.

As we are spending a couple of hours setting up, the local committee gets to work registering the first 200 people, and one of our preachers gets the first of many church services underway. Then we make a test run of the clinics as those first 200 or so make their way through personal evangelism, triage, medical clinic, dental clinic, pharmacy, vision clinic, and finally to the hygiene gifts area. If everything flows smoothly, we are set for the next few days. If there was a problem along the line, we get it corrected before the next morning.

The next three days become a blur. Breakfast is at 7 followed by a team devotional time with clinics opening at 8 a.m. A group is registered and taken at 7 a.m. to a huge tent set up for church services. A brief gospel presentation is given and then each person's blue registration card is validated after the church service . Then the group moves on to the clinic area. They are met by our personal evangelism teams who use the Evangicube for another gospel presentation. They watch for people carrying new Bibles which indicates that person made a decision in the service so that we don't duplicate the responses.

The people move from there to the triage area where some of our team members check and record weights and blood pressure on the blue card. Medical clinic is next. We have had doctors, physician's assistants, registered nurses, and licensed practical nurses on our medical team, and each of them is assigned a station with an interpreter. Families are sent in together to a station where each individual is examined, diagnosed, and necessary prescriptions are marked on the back of the registration card.

The group then moves on to the pharmacy where the prescriptions are filled, and an interpreter goes over the instructions on each prescription with the adults in the group. Individuals needing dental care or vision care go to those clinics, and then the group moves on to the hygiene area where all the gifts are given. In the hygiene are, we get the joy of watching little children get the first sight of new toys, new clothes, new shoes--it's like Christmas over and over and over. All of the services offered in our clinics including all the medicines are free to the Nicaraguan people.

How many people we see in a day is determined by the size of our medical team. This year we had 10 stations, and we saw 1,300 to 1,400 people a day on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. By the end of Wednesday, we were running out of medicines and didn't have what we needed to see more people. We had served over 4,100 people.

Thursday morning is usually packing up morning, and then it's time to say goodbye which is always a difficult time. We travel back to the mission house in Managua, and that evening our interpreters come to have dinner with us and say goodbye--another difficult time.

Friday is our tourist day with the morning given to shopping and the afternoon to sight seeing and more shopping if we can work it in. That night at the mission house we each have a chance to share what God has taught us through the week.

Saturday morning starts very early--3:30 a.m. since we have to be at the airport by 4:30 or 5 for the flight back to Houston.

It's a week full of very hard work, sleeping on cots or on foam pads on the floor, makeshift outdoor showers, stinky outhouses, lots of sweat, and usually lots of mud since July is the rainy season, but the peace of being obedient to God's call outweighs all of the difficulties.

For every medical person on our team, we need 3 or 4 support people to make the trip work. We need average folks--we have both active and retired teachers, trades workers, business owners, stay-at-home moms, students--anyone who hears a call from God to be part of the team. There is a job you can do because God doesn't call the able. He enables the called, and if He puts you on the team, He will have a job for you to do.