Two.

Us at the Bianca's house eating.

Day 3 Tuesday June 10, 2008

6:20 a.m. we wake up. Morning devotion time! I read Daniel chapter 3 about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I also read about God’s power and love in Isaiah 40. After breakfast, we were going to check out the church but got a call from the doctor. We headed towards the hospital all stuffed in a small car. At the hospital we met the doctor as he explained what he had planned for us today. Today he had a diabetic patient come in who needed to clean some open wounds on his legs. With diabetes, your arteries close which limits the glucose from the blood from entering into the mitochondria to produce insulin, the body has a harder time healing wounds. Since the old man got a little open sore on his leg, his body was not able to heal it due to lack of insulin so the sores just got bigger and bigger. We watched the doctor clean his wounds by scrubbing hard on them with anti-bacterial soap. He then scraped the dead skin off and covered his legs with a cream made from herbs. Then he wrapped his leg. Later, we went upstairs to pray for a neighbor who was having surgery. After we all prayed for him, he accepted Jesus into his heart. That was pretty amazing. Next up, we visit the church where we are going to have the carnival. It was pretty small but quite cool. The pastor and his family lived right behind the church which was actually connected to the church. They had an upstairs with open rooms where the kids read and sing. From up there you could see the beautiful mountain and hills. Then the pastor was taking us to visit Las Champas, the place we were going to hold VBS. Las Champas is a small village nearby that is pretty poor. The land there was a lot of muddy and it was a lot more jungle life. The church was called “Nuevo Jerusalem.” We walked around Las Champas in groups of 4 to 5 doing a small prayer walk. Afterwards we met up in the church and prayed. We then headed back home while Bianca, Melissa and I prepared to go see a surgery!!! We are a quick lunch which was so amazing. There was delicious chicken and amazing rice that tasted like fried rice. There was also salad. Porstertomine was the name of the surgery. The same man we prayed for earlier need to take out prostate from his urinary system. We got to the hospital and changed into sterilized scrubs. Super super cool. We put the shoe coverings and the head covering on. We washed our hands all the way up to our elbows then went in. The patient was lying down on a bed that looked like the ones they use for ladies in labor. His legs were propped up because the surgeon was going to stick a metal tube in his “thing.” The metal tubing looked like a long skinny gun. At the end of the gun was a cutting device so that he can cut the prostate gland. The prostate that was left in the system could become cancerous. At the front of the gun was a little hole to look into. Through this, the surgeon was able to see what he was cutting. He let us look into it before he cut it all out and after. Once in a while after cutting, he would pull out the smaller tube and hook a big syringe to the larger tube and suck out the water and prostate pieces. In the end, all the prostate was out and it looked like ground beef. It weighed about 20g. The procedure took about 2 ½ hours and we stood there the whole time. Luckily they had air conditioning in the room so it wasn’t humidly hot. The surgery wasn’t exactly as I had expected because most of the time all we saw was the doctor looking into the tube and pulling the trigger to cut. After the surgery, the doctor showed us some x-rays from another patient they plan on operating later. Muy interesante. We went back home expecting to rest from standing for 3 hours. However, we walked to a couple of stores to get tostadas (thin sugar cookies). Kaelin, the braid master, starts braiding Bianca’s grandma’s hair at the store. A little girl saw and then wanted Kaelin to braid her hair too. So we walked down to her house which was only a house down and braided her hair. She was only 10 years old. When we got back home we are a quick dinner of fried eggs and black beans with sweet bread. Yum. After dinner we headed to Bianca’s uncle’s house for bible study. It was funny when we got there because they wanted us to lead the bible study on the spot. Impromptu. So Kaelin volunteered to give the message of God’s love and we sang worship. Then came the prayer session. Prayer here is so powerful. People were crying everywhere and just burning for God. And when they pray, they not only cru, the shout and praise and speak in tongues. For some reason it didn’t scare me though. I always thought I would be scared at scenes like this. After prayer, we prayed many times, we ate snacks. It was chowmein with ketchup. It sounds gross, but it was delicious. Apparently I was the only one who thought so. It was definitely an amazing night. I had fun.