The last month has easily been the busiest thus far. Mostly, it´s been good, but I´m also feeling pretty overwhelmed by all the work people are asking of me. Primarily, it was my own doing by saying yes to too many ideas. I started is the Coban school this week. The kids are wonderful, but they want me to work two four hour shifts with them. I agreed to work one day a week and they turned that one day into an eight our straight shift of teaching. Kids are great and all, but trying to control 35 at one time really sucks. Moreover, planning for that takes a lot of time and it´s taking away from my primary project on the cooperative. Given that, I think I´m gonna try and make my exit from that school this week. They´ll probably feel pretty let down, but damn, I gotta protect my sanity. If that all goes as planned, I´ll be working in one school on the cooperative and I´ll be able to focus more time on my other projects.

As for other ideas, we are tying to put together a stove project. Like most people in Guatemala, the families all cook over open flames inside the house. On any given day, you can see smoke pouring out from under the roofs. This style is traditional, however it´s terrible for people´s health. In fact, some studies consider it to be the leading cause of premature death. I met an NGO director that runs a stove project who got me on the idea of bringing it to the cooperative. Essentially, the stove runs off 70% less wood, it eliminates smoke from the house and drastically reduces the chance for burns. The doctor who designed the stove got his ideas from seeing repeated burn victims and hernia patients. This was all related to the way people cooked over open fires that required large amounts of wood to be carried in. Check out the site for more details:

http://www.onilstove.com/

Anyways, someone from the NGO came out to the coop last week and gave a presentation about the stove. The people were delighted and are really interested in the project. We think we can get some funding from the Rotary Club so that everyone can afford it. This should be a project that runs over the next two years. The funding will take awhile as will the delivery of the stoves. More importantly however will be the training an upkeep of the stoves to make sure everyone knows how to use them correctly.

This whole stove idea came from a chance encounter I had with the director of the Helps International NGO at one of their medical missions around Coban. The NGO runs the stove project, but their main focus is bringing in doctors to rural communities. So the whole stove idea began with the experience of taking a coop kid to the medical mission run by Helps. He had a really severe burn on his hand from a house fire a few years back. The scarring basically melted the back of his hand to his forearm. I had talked to the dad about taking him in to see a doctor and then we heard about the mission on the radio.

We showed up with Anibal to the hospital only to see about 2,000 other Guatemalans waiting. I remember sitting outside the gates thinking that there was no way we could get in. Luckily though, I met one of the American nurses who got us an appointment. With the mission was a plastic surgeon who was able set up an appointment for the next day. We came back the following morning and the doctors removed the scar off his hand and placed in a skin graft.

This experience was by far the most intense so far. I had to translate and explain the procedure to the dad who had never even heard of anesthesia. I just remember trying to get this howling kid into a surgery smock while explaining the details of a skin graft to the father. They were both terrified and I felt way in over my head. Thankfully everything has turned out pretty well. The skin graft took hold and he should be able to start using his hand again.

The only other hijink was that the doctors left me in charge of changing the bandages. We cut off the cast about two weeks ago and I about barfed when I saw what a skin graft looks like. It´s disgusting if you couldn´t guess. I had no idea what to expect and I couldn´t tell if things were going all right, so I asked a Guatemalan nurse to take a look at it. He responded by telling me it was infected. Of course I freaked. As reliable medical care is nonexistent here, I had horrible ideas about what could happen to the kid if he didn´t get in to see someone. I called around and eventually ended up taking the kid to see another group of American doctors in the area. The checked it out and said it looked just fine. God I hate the Guatemalan medical system. I changed the bandages again yesterday and it still looks gross, but I was assured by the doctors that it´s supposed to be like that. Anibal can move his fingers for the first time and he says he doesn´t feel any pain. It is a huge relief to see that it is working out.

All in all, the last month has been crazy. Mixed in between all thes events were two awful spells of diarrhea, but I really don´t need to get into that. Hopefully I´ll get this school business worked out and things will calm down for awhile.