Here is an update from Bolivia. The best news: we finally finished the house for Dr. Ino and his family on our mission base in the south, which also serves as a guest house. Bringing electricity, water and drainage to this remote place, about 5,600 feet up in the mountains, was not easy. We inaugurated our medical center here a year and a half ago, and with Dr. Ino now living on site, patients are assured of care whenever an emergency arises.
Dr. Ino and his family
We have worked with Dr. Ino since 1996, eighteen years now. He is the current Director of the Bolivian Medical Mission. He and his wife have three children, Paola, Eric and Sarah, now in Pharmacology and Medicine at a local university. The new house also ends a ten-year lease on a large rented house for family and volunteers, myself included, which also stored our medical equipment and medicines.
The last obstacle
The last obstacle was a serious illness of Dr. Ino. Returning from a medical expedition in the Amazon, he had contracted Dengue, a tropical disease carried by the Aedes mosquito, whose symptoms range from fever and joint pain to a dangerous drop in blood pressure and, sometimes, internal bleeding. There is still no vaccine. We had more than 30,000 cases of dengue in the Bolivian Amazon during the 2008 floods, and tens of thousands more in northern Pakistan during the 2010-2011 floods.
But, thank God, Dr. Ino is recuperating well at this moment.
I was spared the disease myself, but came back from South America with acute abdominal problems. Fearing a relapse of my illness from the previous year, a 15% probability, doctors sent me straight to the Emergency Department in Florida. The tests showed only acute viral gastroenteritis.
South to the Brazilian border
Back in Bolivia, we ran medical expeditions in the southeast, close to the Brazilian border, in the Amazon basin, where there is normally no medical or pastoral help at all. We also went to our base in Santa Ana de Yacuma, in the northeast, though we are now more active in the southeast: families linked to the local drug mafia have made Santa Ana a place of extortion, and staying hundreds of miles away keeps us safer.
The clinical work continues well. Dr. Betsabe reaches the regions around Ocuri and Ravelo, at 13,000 feet, from our Andes base. Dr. Oscar still runs the clinic in Paichu, at 9,000 feet, now paid by the Bolivian state. Dr. Hugo, an internist with us for fifteen years, works at our Medical Center with Dr. Esther and Dr. Ino. Pastor Romulo is finally blessed to have his church rebuilt, after his old mud-brick one did not survive a landslide in the Cordillera de Madinga, 11,000 feet high.
Haiti and Pakistan
In Haiti, we keep being challenged. Our two clinics in Manceaux and Morency run on a minimum of medication, and we are barely able to feed all the orphans. Despite promotion on many levels and a Crown Funding project, we did not receive the money needed to build a shelter for them.
Manceaux and Morency are really one of the worst and the poorest regions I ever have witnessed during 24 years of outreaches.
This is discouraging and frustrating. We want to give the Haitian orphans shelter, schooling and hope in a region where there is none. In Pakistan, it is not much better: too many cases need urgent medical attention or surgery, while drought in the Sindh region has caused countless deaths among infants and children from dehydration, on top of the constant dangers of extremist groups and the struggle between small Christian ministries for money to help others.
From California to Belgium
I will now be traveling and speaking in a church in California, whose Pastor and an elder I met on a mission in Haiti two years ago. WME, World Missionary Evangelization, has invited me to speak on medical missions in the 21st century, and from there I will go to Belgium and the Netherlands to witness in churches and attend a conference. Anyone interested in a slide show and the mission's witness can write to RikCelie@gmail.com or DrRik@DoctorsOnMission.org.
