Dominican Republic Day 1

Hello from the Dominican Republic! We arrived here in the DR last night at 9pm. The trip here was fairly uneventful.  Originally, we planned on arriving at 3pm, but there was a flight cancelation in Tampa and a delay in Miami.  By God’s grace, we made it through customs without a problem. After landing in Santa Domingo, we had a three-hour drive to the city Jarabacoa. We arrived in Jarabacoa at midnight and then the real fun began. On Friday, we had sorted all the meds by kind in their original bottles and packed them into suitcases. Now we had to sort it all out into the clinic bags because in the morning we were going to two different clinical sites.  We were up till 2am counting vitamins and certain medicines. Personally, I sorted about 3,000 vitamins into 30 count bags! Today they let us “sleep in” till 7:30.  We left for the clinic at 9am and ran clinic from 10-5. At our clinic site we saw a total of 83 pts and gave hygiene products and vitamins to a few dozen more. As the nursing student, I was paired with an ARNP student and we were put in charge of triage and vitals. The clinic took place in a little three room building in a rural village about 30 minutes from the Monastery. Did I mention I’m staying in a monastery? Well, it used to be a monastery. Now it’s used primarily to house groups like ours.

As far as interesting patients goes, I did see a child with polydactyly (an extra digit), He had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. I also saw two patients with systolic BP’s over 180 and neither weighed over 100 lbs! For my non-medical friends, basically when your blood pressure gets that high you are at a high risk for stroke and cardiovascular complications.  

We got back to the monastery at 5:30 and had dinner at 6. We had to resort the meds again to make sure that both clinics tomorrow got enough. 

It’s so funny how quickly the extreme become the familiar. I still remember the wonder and excitement of my first international trip. I wrote pages and pages about my experiences detailing every new sight and sound. Now I can summarize my whole day in a few paragraphs.  I like that this is becoming the new normal for me.

Also, the things that were strange and bothersome when I first started traveling internationally aren’t so strange and bothersome any more. It’s just the way things are. You change your expectations. Don’t except air conditioning, don’t expect to be comfortable, and don’t expect to eat on any kind of regular schedule. Don’t expect to not be tired; don’t expect to ‘have it your way’.

I bought a book specifically for this trip. It’s called When Helping Hurts. I heard about it a few years ago, but I never got around to reading it.  The big point of the book is the difference between relief work and development work. Many of the concepts were things I had considered before. But it’s given me a lot of food for thought.  I used to just assume that these international medical brigades were a good idea. But now I’m really looking into the effects of trips like these.