June 19th Medical Mission Post

June 19, 2014

This morning we set out for Alhamra, about 2 hours outside of Amman towards the Ramtha border crossing with Syria.  We were given a school to work in that had three stories, so we set up the pharmacy on the ground floor; the second floor was OBGYN, optometry, general medicine, and dental. The third floor was for humanitarian projects. We had games for kids, jump rope, balls, coloring, face painting, and then distribution of baby formula and diapers.

The funny thing is when the people got to the third floor it seems that they all had twins so they could get double of what we had! Finally, I asked one of the elders if there was something in the water, and I wanted to see the paperwork showing that they really did have twins. Well some did but others did not, of course.

The humanitarians started to paint the walls of the school inside in some beautiful colors. The crowd control was handled by our drivers.

We saw over 300 patients at this clinic and the cases we very hard and we had to do a lot of referrals: needed dialysis; heart stint was infected and had to be removed; badly infected shot gun wound; MS patient; pregnant 13 year old girl; numerous cases of scabies and other skin rashes; numerous cases of malnutrition; blood transfusion

The school was so dirty with garbage and trash inside.  We decided to get the kids to help clean so we gave them a present – each one grabbed a trash bag and got running to get the garbage picked up.  It was so much fun watching them, and other kids heard about it and started coming to us and said “I want to help!” The place looked so different by the time they finished.

It was a long, long day and we got out by 6pm and then went to the hotel for a debriefing.   Afterwards we had a nice dinner at Tawaheen Al-Hawa Restaurant.