Before I began this journey I was warned that Day One, Clinic Day, was the longest and hardest day. Clinic Day is the day that we triage all of the patients that have come to find out if they are eligible for Rotaplast surgery. And we evaluate ALL of them in one day, like this young, adorable fellow. Almost all Rotaplast patients are young children.
For the Rotaplast volunteer team, Clinic Day begins at 5:30 am and lasts until about 8:00 pm and we are running around like crazy people all day long. Its hot, most of us do not speak the language, our equipment doesn’t work right, we don’t know our team members very well, and on and on and on. At about 9 am, I looked at my watch expecting it to be about noon and was shocked. But then I went outside to take these photos and was reminded that these folks had been here ALL. Night. Long. And more than that, many of them had traveled a great distance, some of them weeks, for this opportunity. Today wasn’t a long day for them, it was a life time journey of struggling with a disability and today the beginning of something much, much better for their children.
So with a lot of translation help from our friends at the Interact Club of Guatemala De La Asuncion Colegio Interamericano :
We saw over 200 of these cuties!
And over the next 8 days we are going to help as many of them as we can, although, they already look pretty happy to me. They had us smiling and laughing all day long!