Moses Brown Dominican Republic Service Trip 2010

Hi everyone, yesterday was a packed day. We woke up at 615 so that we could go out to breakfast at trigo for some of Shyloe's favorite chocolate croissants. Afterward, we went to a batey, where we were greeted by many curious children. We set up inside their small one-room school house. We sorted the medicines into a pharmacy and began to let patients in. Some gave our donations, some took blood pressure, some played with the kids and de-wormed, and the rest of us scribed. I scribed and it was and incredible learning experience, where I watched the patient describe their pain and then the translator interpret their hurried words for the doctor. The doctor and interpreter conversed back and forth discussing their own thoughts on the diagnosis, because my interpreter actually also had some medical training. There were many maybe pregnancies and many hopeful to have children, but there were also many more cases with a more somber tone such as the threat of the c word (cancer) or quickly approaching blindness without surgery. We stopped for a short lunch break and continued to see about 40 more patients afterward. Once we loaded up the bus, while saying our sad goodbyes to the children, we took the long bus ride back to the hotel. During the trip, a few other curious students and I proceeded to bombard a medical student who had come on the trip as a doctor with questions. She was a gynecologist and was so passionate about her work. As she answered our questions ranging from what blood pressure really meant to questions about premature infants, her passion seemed into her answers when her eyes would light up and exclaim that the answer to one of or questions was just still a mystery to science waiting to be discovered. Her true excitement for her work was incredibly inspiring. Once we dropped the doctors and interpreters off , we visited a mostly all girls orphanage. We brought them toys and played with all the kids who seemed to be ecstatic to see us and also liked to refer to us as their American. We played with the bouncy balls we brought and they did our hair. Then we got a tour of the orphanage which was very orderly. We saw their kitchen, dinning room, bedrooms, and ended with the laundry room. The woman who ran the orphanage, who had given us the tour, pointed out the window into what appeared to be a garden with large metal structures stemming from the concrete surrounding the what appeared to be flower beds. In reality, it was her dream. She stared out the window exclaiming how it was her dream to create another building where she could house 500 more orphans. After the bus ride to the hotel, we had a few minutes to take a shower and then leave for dinner. We went out to “Fuego Fuego” for dinner where we ate a range of different “sandwishes”. Fuego Fuego was a small restaurant, and like many others, it was outdoors just off the sidewalk. We learned new camp games, how to make a loud (some-whatly obnoxious noise) by blowing on grass, and we also “attempted” to learn how to make owl noises by blowing into our cupped hands from Sarah. After eating, we went to an ice cream place for dessert. The flavors tended to be very surprising and completely not what they appeared to be. Therefore, there was a lot of people getting plain chocolate, but it was yummy. Finally, at 10:30, we returned to the hotel to go to sleep.