Never did I ever…think I would live at a hospital, but Bolivia proved to be a month of firsts. And no I’m wasn’t a patient in the hospital, last month my team was partnered with an American organization called Hospitals of Hope which runs a Hospital in the Bolivian countryside just outside of Cochabamba.
From the second we arrived we knew God had beyond blessed us. The house we lived in behind the hospital was enormous and beautiful, and our contact for the month, Leta, was American and spoke english! This was huge for us, after struggling with elementary amounts of Spanish and contacts that spoke no english for two months our brains were ready for a rest.
Our first night in the house Leta told us our first ministry would be cleaning up the town square in Anacoraire, a village about a 5 minute walk from the hospital, for a festival they were having that weekend. We painted some trees (to keep the bugs off) and picked up garbage, but a majority of our time that day was spent at the school watching dance after dance from all the regions of Bolivia, performed by every different grade in the school from preschool to 12 grade.
Afterwards we were given the “icing on the cake,” the hospital was going to be in a parade for the festival the next morning and they wanted us to be in it too…wearing scrubs. So that night we went through the hall closet filled with scrubs and each picked out the scrubs that fit us best. They didn’t typically match, but that was ok. In the morning we proudly posed for pictures and took our place in the parade lineup. First went the ambulance, followed by the med-students/interns and then us, a rainbow blob of white faces with no idea what to do, so we marched on, and when we finished marching we piled into the ambulance and drove back to the hospital. The parade wasn’t even finished but apparently in Bolivia you don’t have to stick around…
The hospital itself is made up of two sections, Emergencias, and general medicine. Doctors take appointments every morning from 8 to noon in specialties such a pediatrics, internal medicine and cardiology. In the US these same doctors would typically work in their own office, in a building far away from a hospital, but in Bolivia, everything is different, and doctors only work half days.
Exam rooms are in the middle section and the waiting room/offices are in the two story part.
The back of the hospital, the ER is to the right
On of my ministries for the month was working at the hospitals’ coffee shop, Xelda, serving coffee to the patients as they waited in the waiting room. It wasn’t a super busy ministry. Tea or drip coffee was free and occasionally patients would take advantage of it but we also made drinks such as lattes and cappuccinos, often for the doctors or interns, so many mornings I was able to have good, although choppy conversations with the interns and I found that my ministry was really on both sides of the spectrum, both patients and doctors.
My most interesting moment in the hospital however happened when I became the patient. We were conveniently at the hospital all month, so I figured it was the perfect opportunity to get more medication for my hyperthyroidism. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Leta came to the appointment with me because, well, she is fluent in Spanish and I am not. From the second we walked into the room I knew it was going to be an interesting experience, why? Because of the 6 med students staring at me. We sat down and Dr. Oquendo, the internal medicine doctor, asked me some questions, then he asked me to get up on the examination table. The sea of med students had to part to let me through. He asked me to lie down and I soon figured out I was the teaching subject. Three med students held my right arm, another was listening to my heart, yet another was taking my blood pressure and the last one was poking at my stomach and the whole time the doctor lectured them on the differences between hyper and hypo thyroidism. It was the most awkward 5 minutes of my life. Even more awkward because these were people I would see and interactwith on a daily basis.
The same exam room I for my appt. only not nearly as many interns (Photo by nurse Shelly)
But as awkward as some of the moments were at the hospital, I really enjoyed my time there. I loved riding in the ambulance, walking the long, white, hallway between the waiting room and the ER, and how the ER doctors and nurses all jumped in anticipation everytime we would open the door late at night to go in the hospital and use the internet.
Hospitals of Hope is the first ministry I’ve worked with on the World Race that I could really see myself going back and partnering with again, in fact I plan to, but you know how plans go… there’s still 8 months left in the race, so I guess I’ll see what God has in store.
