Walking With El Salvador

There are many times when we look back at moments shared or things accomplished with our sister church in El Salvador that we just shake our heads and marvel.  The connections made and friendships built during our very first little Mission of Healing in our sister church community is one of those moments.  We had never been to our sister church community before, we knew nothing about the neighboring community, Distrito,  nor the little clinic there, but the wisdom of the locals to cultivate relationships between their neighbor nurses and their new US friends has born a lot of fruit over the past 15 years. On Friday, after a couple of days out in the countryside dodging cows and learning about rural, door-to-door medicine, we traveled back to where it all began:  the little clinic in Distrito Italia.   We were pretty excited to go there - to see if maybe some of the original staff was still there, to see how the clinic has changed since our last visit there several years ago, and to c

A calm bit of road which allowed for a photo Another early morning and another long ride out to San Pedro Puxtla.  Upon our arrival we were excited to learn that this day was a truck day!  On truck day, the team has access to the government pick-up truck in order to deliver heavy boxes of medications and supplies to remote sites where once per month the team runs a medical clinic.  The ride to this month's remote site was "in the opposite direction of the ECO base, in an area that scares us because the gangs have come there and sometimes threaten the health workers."  It was sad for us to hear that gang activity had come to this remote location and hard to understand what possible economic value gang members could find in terrorizing these incredibly poor farmers.  We bumped along the road without incident, bracing ourselves so that our heads would not hit the ceiling of the cab.  We could not stop laughing because the bumps were incredible!  We asked if the truck had