Chapter 3 – Jungle Health Care

Stroudwater Dentistry Services

One of the hallmark ministries our church offers to the villagers of Cuatro Cayos is dentistry services.  Dental health is like any other health condition in the village; lacking, and in a poor state. Unfortunately the villagers consume locally grown sugarcane to supplement their caloric shortfall, resulting in a lot of rotted teeth and gum disease (among other health issues).  

As in years past the team set up the dental clinic on the front porch of Pastor Carlos’ house.  For the last three years our medical professionals brought a marked improvement to oral health, but were frustrated by the limitation of choosing either to clean teeth that were good or to extract teeth that were bad.  

This year our dental team resolved to do the virtually impossible; drill and fill cavities and polish teeth white in a jungle environment devoid of electricity and clean water.  If you know anything about dental equipment, you know that the familiar shriek of the dentist drill is driven by compressed air; compressed air comes from an air compressor, and air compressors are powered by electricity.  If you want electricity in a jungle you have make your own; we used a portable Honda generator to power medical grade air compressors to drive the air tools used by our medical professionals.   And VOILA!  Our medical staff had high speed dentist drills that for the first time could grind out cavities and polish teeth.

 The long lines of patients in the waiting area (some people walked for over an hour from other villages to get their teeth worked on) led to long, grueling days of focused effort from Drs. Wayne and Kyra and the dental support team, but the quality of life differences they created were stark.

People who has been too embarrassed to smile because of their hideous cavities cried tears of joy when they looked in the mirror and saw their pearly whites.  If the transformation in their appearance was amazing, the transformation in their self esteem was humbling.  One evening during devotions Dr. Kyra emotionally shared how all the challenges and hardships of the trip were worth it because she had been able to put smiles back onto the faces of the young men, women and the children of the village. 

The Cuatro Cayos Medical Clinic

The medical clinic is a new venture for our church and for the village of Cuatro Cayos.  Its purpose is to provide a clean, secure, stable workplace for medical professionals to provide services. When finished it will obviously be a big improvement over Pastor Carlos’ front porch for dentistry work, and it holds out the promise of housing other medical services as well.

Mixing up and hauling buckets of cement into the medical center was the order of the day.  We were surprised and pleased to find a lot of cement block was laid when we got there, but none of the vertical columns necessary to hold the structure up (and support a second story that is planned for the future) had been poured; in fact, the wooden vertical forms for the columns had not even been built.  We started building forms first thing Friday morning, and as soon as a few were done we started mixing concrete.  Sort of.  Unbeknownst to us we had rented the rowdiest, most cantankerous gas powered cement mixer in all of Guatemala. 
















The carburetor was bad (even after we disassembled it, cleaned out the filth, and put it back together) and it required someone to manually govern the engine speed just to keep it running. The thing got to jumping around so badly that at times we needed 2 or 3 guys to stand on it just to hold it down on the ground!  Anyway, it still beat hand mixing, and we made, carried and poured a lot of cement.  Our construction team managed to get all the necessary columns built, poured, dried, and wooden forms stripped away, plus the courses of headers all got cemented in which tied it all together.

It was a fair bit of work given our limited time there, but at least now the walls won’t topple over.  After having read Ken Follett last year, it was my own personal Pillars of the Earth experience!  J

The most satisfying part of this build, for me anyway, was the pouring of the front step of the medical center porch.  Al, our construction boss, pauses to overlook our handiwork, most importantly our trademark brand set in the concrete step; the mosaic Stroudwater Christian Fish (Ichthys) that is cast into every concrete structure our church builds in Guatemala.  It was very rewarding on Wednesday to pull the wooden form off and see the finished product. 

The Medical Clinic is a huge undertaking, and it’s far from complete.  Minimally, its two service bays will need to be lined with ceramic tiles, floor and walls, to create a clean surface that can be properly sanitized.  It also will get a second story and a proper steel roof where solar panels can be mounted to generate electricity for lights, medical equipment and an electric pump to pump clean drinking water into a holding tank for medicinal use.  All of these will be evaluated as projects for next year, but in the end the clinic holds the potential to profoundly impact the quality of life in the village.  Not only will it make our own dentistry ministry safer and more efficient, it opens the door to medical professionals from other organizations to come in and provide health care.  When complete other churches, NGOs, even Doctors Without Borders will be able to come in and use the facility to offer a variety of medical services to villagers of Cuatro Cayos, and to the villages beyond.

Next time – Too much fun with paint, and final thoughts. Adios!      -- Doug