The Latest News From Our Ministry!
Our third trip to Guatemala, August 2023!
What a joy it was to return to our kids and patients at Jardin de Amor August of this year.
As always, they greeted me with such love and gratitude and hundreds of smiles and hugs from both the children and adults.
During our time here we have seen hundreds of patients over the visits and I can say with all honesty it has helped me fall back in love with medicine again.
Due to the wonderful donations from some very loving folks here in the U.S. and abroad we were able to pay for three months of food for 270 children, three months of pay for our wonderful nurse Maxi and medications for the patients. We also had the privilege of meeting a group of volunteers from Spain who come out each year to build, at no cost, new classrooms for the school. As before, we were able to run free urinalysis, ultrasounds and a wide variety of exams and procedures for the patients and children of the little village of Santa Maria de Jesus.
A NEW HOSPITAL IN THE PLANS!
There has been an exciting change to our little clinic and school. Meeting with Julio, the founder of Jardin de Amor, he revealed to me the new plans to build a free care hospital for this little pueblo. It will include a birthing center, surgical facilities, exam rooms and post op rooms. Julio has decided to build the hospital in the same town of Santa Maria de Jesus due to the extreme poverty and lack of medical care for the folks of this village. He has asked for our assistance to make this dream of his a reality.
To that end we will be running a series of donations events to aid in this new adventure. Please consider finding it in your hearts to help these gentle folk from Guatemala.
100% of donations go to purchasing food, medications, paying for the nurse and clothing for the patients and people of Guatemala.
We use no money from donations for administration fees or travel expenses for the doctor. These expenses are paid for from the doctor and his wife's private income.
If you would like to see some of the new photos from this last trip please feel free to check out our Gallery page.
It is our goal to help Jardin de Amor grow this little, low resource clinic into a small free care hospital for the people of rural Guatemala. We are in the slow process of adding the ability for services such as OB/GYN, emergency medicine, long term chronic care, nutrition programs, minor surgery, blood tests, and so much more. Any donations are most welcome and appreciated as we have added a new fulltime nurse, hired from the local community. We have added a new donation service called DonorBox.org. You can find the link for our donation campaign here and on the donation page.
Again, thank you to all who donated for this trip.
We Have Returned To Guatemala! (May, 2023)
On April 30, 2023 we had the wonderful privilege and honor to return to the little clinic of Jardin de Amor in Guatemala!
Our stay was for one week and we saw over 51 patients in a short span of days witnessing everything from wounds, colds, rampant diabetes, malnutrition, an epidemic of diarrhea and anxiety and depression in numerous patients. We were able to hand out thousands of dollars in medications and other treatments thanks to the wonderful generosity of our donors. Each and every patient was treated at no charge. We also handed out shoes to those with medical conditions involving their feet, due to wearing old and worn out sandals.
One of the most important changes that occurred this time was the addition of a full time nurse which we would like to keep on staff with donations. She will be there when we are not, keeping up with our patients medications and treatments. We also gifted to the head of the school and clinic a new iPad so we can do future Zoom and Facetime meetings with the patients while I am away.
We also were able to add a new level of contribution to our ministry with Guatemala. We discovered a serious need for nutrition for the chldren of the rural areas of Guatemala with many children being malnourished. As a part of our distribution of donations we were able to purchase a months supply of food for the 270 children of the school, for only $300 US!
During our stay we ran dozens of lab including urinalysis, A1C diabetic, anemia and blood glucose monitoring tests. Ultrasounds were run for many of the women who never had these scans done before.
At the end of this trip I was honored by a ceremony where the entire school gifted me with a beautiful thank you cloth for myself and my wife, handmade by the children themselves. You can see the picture in our Gallery section of this site.
Please go to our Gallery for the new pictures from this stage of our journey!
It is our goal to help Jardin de Amor grow this little, low resource clinic into a small free care hospital for the people of rural Guatemala. We are in the slow process of adding the ability for services such as OB/GYN, emergency medicine, long term chronic care, nutrition programs, minor surgery, blood tests, and so much more. Any donations are most welcome and appreciated as we have added a new fulltime nurse, hired from the local community. We have added a new donation service called DonorBox.org. You can find the link for our donation campaign here and on the donation page.
Again, thank you to all who donated for this trip. Your donations helped pay for a nurse from the local community, food for a month for 270 children, thousands of dollars in medications and shoes for those lacking the basic essentials.
The food for 270 children with the school. I am with my dear friend Julio Garcia, the founder and owner of the Jardin de Amor School and clinic.
OUR NEW NURSE MAXI!
Our First Mission to Guatemala A Wonderful Success!
This Saturday, January 21st, I returned from my first medical mission to Guatemala.
It was such an amazing blessing running a small, low resource clinic for a week in the tiny town of Santa Maria de Jesus. It is part of a free school called Jardin de Amor (Garden of Love) founded and run by a wonderful and generous man by the name of Julio. He runs the children's school from ages 4 to 16 and also offers them training in a trade skill such as cooking, weaving or carpentry.
He opened the free clinic (a single room) with the hope of doctors and other medical staff coming and volunteering as they cannot afford a permanent position.
Working in conjunction with a volunteer organization they are able to bring medical volunteers to the clinic as they become available.
I had the great privilege of running the clinic for a week with an amazing staff of volunteers from around the world. We were able to bring with us an ultrasound, EKG,
urinalysis supplies, medications, digital otoscope, fetal doppler and much more. I ran more ultrasounds than I kept track of as most of the patients had rarely ever seen a doctor.
Many cannot read or write and for a large number of them did not even know their birth date as they had been born at home with little to no medical records in existence.
We treated such a wide variety of issues ranging from urinary tract infections, ovarian cysts, prolapsed bladder, and damaged female organs from botched medical procedures. Many of the patients were women with anxiety disorders due to abuse from their husbands and the system.
I wanted to say thank you to the gentle woman in Montana for your generous donation. It went completely for buying medications for patients who could not afford them on their own.
Because of you many were able to start their road to healing.
I will write more in the future but I am including a short (less then three minutes) video of some of what we experienced on our journey in Guatemala. It comes with a music sound track.
We will be returning very soon and would like this small clinic to be a permanent part of our ministry's assistance program. Again, thank you to everyone who helped make this a reality.
We will keep you updated on the next mission to this wonderful, little clinic hidden away in the beautiful country of Guatemala.
A new ultrasound for our remote work in Guatemala!
We are happy to announce that we were able to purchase a new portable ultrasound
which can be used in remote locations. We will be taking it to a small clinic in a low resource area outside of Antigua, Guatemala in January.
Our first overseas medical volunteering mission wil be to Guatemala in the middle of January. The clinic we have been assigned to is a small one with only the bare essentials and not enough money to be able to afford a full time doctor.
We have been told we will be seeing anywhere from 10 to 20 patients a day for the week we are in country.
We will be focusing mainly on patients presenting with hypertension, diabetes, anxiety and depression, parasites and women's issues. The ultrasound mentioned above will be giving many of them the oppurtunity for radiology diagnostics for the first time in their lives. The enitre mission is meant to offer quality medical care at no cost to so many who have never seen a doctor before.
With this trip being successful we will then be able to take volunteers with us on furture trips.