We were so blessed to get to spend a week in Honduras with Jeff's school doing dental work last week! We were in the city of Valle de Angelos. It is about 30 minutes from Tegucigalpa, which is where we flew in to. Come to find out, its one of the most dangerous airports in the world because of the short runway and it is sandwiched between two mountains, so if you don't get up fast enough you will run straight into the mountain! Luckily, we had no problems. We stayed in the Adventist Hospital and our clinic was right down the hill from us. By clinic, I mean the empty building that they put some chairs in. Since we arrived on the weekend, we got to go to church there! It was such a humbling experience and the speakers were so good. (Jeff was so sweet to translate for me.) I think about 80% of the people came and shook our hands and welcomed us. We also got to go ziplining on the weekend! We had some really funny guides that made it so much fun. They even let us do some tricks (see pictures below).
During the week, we woke up and ate breakfast at the hospital. Then we would start at the clinic around 8:30 or 9. We wanted to start earlier but they wouldn't serve breakfast any earlier because they had a Spanish Bible study in the morning.. Anyway. We had 3 restorative chairs for fillings, 2 chairs for extractions, and then 2 hygienist cleaning teeth on a wooden bench. Another wife and I assisted and ran the sterilization. Unfortunately the chairs we had didn't go low enough to sit, so we stood all day long in really awkward positions. Jeff ended up pulling over 40 teeth and did about 20 fillings, not to shabby since before this trip he had only done a filling and no extractions! It was such a great learning experience for both of us and we felt so good getting to serve the people. At night we either ate at the hospital or went and tried some local restaurants. We were so tired at night that we seriously just sat in this lounge area. Just sat. Somehow we got like 9 hours of sleep every night and still felt exhausted. But so worth it!
Friday we packed up all of our equipment and headed to Tegucigalpa. We stayed in this nice hotel so that we would be close to the airport in the morning. We got to see the temple being built on our way to the airport! We had been told all these scary stories about Honduras, but we had no problems at all! We had fun and got to make some great friends and learned a ton!
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