By Crystal Hoblit
Getting the airplane ready for an medical flight in the morning.
The rains have returned! We are so thankful. It was a very long dry season and our well wasn’t keeping up. We would get several gallons each day but had to resort to collecting rain from the roof to wash our laundry and sometimes ourselves. In the two or three weeks leading up to the first good rain, we would get tiny little showers every now and then which greened things up but didn’t fully soak deep enough to affect our well’s water level. Yesterday, rain set in and it rained heavenly rain all day. Enough to wake the termites from their long slumber, I guess that means the dry season is officially over.
This past month has been unusually busy. We had many different cases of emergency flights. Cancer, burns, surgeries, fractures, heart conditions.
Fractured arm.
One case, in particular, is dear to our hearts because the patient is from Rus Rus.
A few days after the last great fire that we fought here in our village, a little girl was out walking in the area that had been burned. Her parents were not home and the burned area was close to her house. As she was walking, her foot sank into a hole where tree roots were burning under the ground. Immediately she tried to pull it out but it had become stuck and didn’t come out easily. By the time she got it out her entire foot was burned. Her toes were melted together. Her skin looked like melted plastic that had hardened. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about it, until her mother came home hours later and brought her to the clinic. It was too late in the day to do a transport so first thing in the morning Brad took them to a hospital. A week later, having transported a boy with a broken arm, he was back at the same hospital and decided to check in on the little girl. She was in bed with nothing but a diaper and hadn’t received the care she needed. Her foot was not bandaged and nothing had been done for her. In the same ward there was also a teen girl who’s entire back was badly burned. The Dr. told them they had no medicine and could do nothing for either of them. Brad spent the next few days making lots of phone calls and trying to work out the logistics of moving a girl and her mother from La Mosquitia who had no identification papers to a big city hospital. Would another hospital even accept them with no IDs? Where would the mother stay while her daughter was in the hospital? How would they manage since they spoke no Spanish? It seemed like an impossible task, and yet the weight of knowing if she didn’t get proper medical care, she may never use her foot again or possibly even lose it.
At our clinic the night before she was transported to the hospital.
Enter: God. As usual He has everything under control. No ID? Check. They got a special wavier. There is a specialized childrens burn hospital in a city that we wanted to send her to, but they don’t accept everyone, only certain cases. Check. She was accepted. Housing? Check. The mother could stay with her in the hospital, meals included. Only speaks mosquito? Check again. The teen girl who was burned, was also transported on the same flight to the burn hospital. Her sister who went with her, speaks Spanish and Mosquito. The two girls ended up sharing a room. We just shake our heads in awe and wonder at the Lord.
She has currently has her toes separated, skin grafting and is in therapy to walk again. Yesterday, we showed a video of her in therapy to her dad and he got the biggest smile on his face. He doesn’t speak Spanish either but his smile said it all! The Lord is so good, it’s through His healing and mercy that she will live a normal life again!