Trevor: Saturday, June 16, 2007

One of Diane's cleft lip patients posing for a picture

This weekend started a little bit early for us, as we headed down to Tom and Diane's on Thursday afternoon. Early Friday morning, we went over to the hospital, as a doctor from the mainland is here to conduct surgery on some of Diane's patients with cleft lips and cleft pallets. She had to help the children and their mothers go through pre-operation screening, which involved x-rays, blood tests, and urine tests. In the Philippines, unlike the US, hospitals don't provide things like x-ray paper or medicines. Patients are required to buy them from a pharmacy. However, since most patients aren't able to just get up and walk across the street to the nearest pharmacy, they must have someone with them at all times, usually a family member, who is called a "watcher." Each morning, the hospital conducts "watcher training." Diane had to run back and forth to buy x-ray paper and medicine as well as check on patients' results. We joked that she had walked miles around the hospital.

Out of the 8 children who came to the hospital, 5 were accepted for surgery, since the other 3 had coughs or runny noses. We'll be going back tomorrow to watch the doctor from the mainland make his rounds. The surgeries will be on Monday and Tuesday next week.

Also on Thursday, we visited the Department of Education office, and we were referred all of the way up to the District Superintendent, who gave us a CD of the entire elementary curriculum, with all of the subjects. We have over 100 pages of material about the English curriculum, so we should be able to get a good start on the new Mapa curriculum this week.