Village Medical Team

The trip to our last village on Tuesday was almost as adventurous as our day at the Village of Chunox (pronounced Chinush), population of about 1,000. The ride there was approximately 1.25 hours on long bumpy roads and entailed crossing 2 rivers by “hand cranked” ferries. Yes----we gave the workers a rest and hand cranked ourselves to the other side!

One of the first things we did when we arrived was to do a home visit for the Santoya family. They have five children, three of whom have a debilitating disease that affects their eyesight and motor skills. By about age 1 these children start to lose their eyesight and their arms and legs begin to contract, until eventually they are confined to a chair or bed. The oldest, Clary, Aroni and Mari (ages 15, 12 and 9), respectively) are all affected. The two youngest, Jenny and Melli do not have the disease. The father is not at home very much as he works at San Pedro Island to send money back home. Their mother, Melva, is a woman to be admired, as well as prayed for. She works tirelessly to take care of her 5 children, basically on her own.

The team does what it can to take care of this families ‘physical needs as much as possible, but most of all we continually pray for them and lift them up to God and come back each year to love them, as God loves us.

While the story of the Santoya family is much more difficult than most others’ many of the people in Belize or other countries with similar situations don’t have a lot of the basic things that we take for granted. They don’t have some of the basic food and shelter needs met or the availability of medical care that we do. We served over 230 people in this village today, bringing our total patients to about 1,000 over the four days that we had the medical clinic open.
Later, as we reflected about our trip , it is easy to see that even though there was lots of hard work our week here was very rewarding and provided a way for us to give back to others’ some of things that God has blessed us with.

This team is led by Julie Hall and includes Anita Anderson, Amy Black, Greg Brokamp, Nancy Brokamp, Lana Caney, Beth Frost, Carol Grimm, Elly Grimm, Tom Grimm, Alex Leary, Doug Moore, Ann Morency, Karen Mullins, Will Mullins, Susan Phillips, Joe Rosen, Kathy Rosen, Irene Tackett and Jo Ann Videtto.