Friday, 13 July
Hospital de la Esperanza [Hospital of Hope]
Anocaire, Vinto, Cochabamba, Bolivia

Posting: Jim Mahon

Dear St John’s staff and parishioners,
We are all fine, apart from a cold making the rounds. We finally arrived on Sunday night and started work on Monday. We’ve now developed a pretty good rapport with the staff at the Hospital of Hope, where almost half of us work in arranging and carrying out surgeries. The rest of us are on a clinic team that goes out to neighborhoods and villages to see patients and dispense medicine, including fluoride treatments to dental patients.
We all started slowly on Monday. For the clinic team this was on purpose, since they needed to work the bugs out of their routines without the press of hundreds of patients. For the surgery team it was the result of a big departure from the usual practice of MMI delegations. This hospital is so good that rather than take over the whole thing or a wing of it, as happens when the facilities are badly used or substandard, we have had to work closely with very competent staff who do not (with good reason) just allow us to displace them. So it took a few days to work out how to coordinate everything we do. I think the hospital staff were a bit surprised by the volume of work we have added, however, even though the “surgery campaign” (our presence in town) has been advertised around here for a while.
From the medical side, it turns out that we have lots and lots of gallbladder cases, many with incredibly large stones. Bart says he’s not tired of them yet. In fact he says that it might not be possible to get tired of gallbladders.
As for what each of the others has been doing, here’s a general rundown: Laurie has been coordinating the scheduling of surgeries; Adrienne has been an OR assisting nurse; Jim and John Kolesar have been on the clinic team, Jim as assistant pharmacist and John as a “runner” who takes patients around; Sam has been doing both of these; Peter has been giving fluoride treatments as well as passing out dental care paraphernalia; and I have been helping with patient intake for all the hospital’s cases between 8 and noon, then translating for surgery consults and post-op family communication. Our friend Evan Kapanga found some very prickly amoebas in Peru and is sick but improving.
All in all, we are very grateful for this opportunity to share our faith, and through us the faith of you our congregation, with our sisters and brothers in this part of Bolivia. We look forward to sharing more details of our stay upon our return.
Yours in Christ,
Jim