Sugar Cane

As previously mentioned, Patchacan is a small village in a rural community.

Their major crop is sugar cane and harvest season has just started.

More info can be found here.

Here, sugar cane is a seasonal, labor intensive, inefficient means of living.

It also is associated with a host of work related injuries, both acute and chronic.

It is harvested by burning the field (I have no idea how they burn the field without burning the crop), cutting it down with machetes and loaded onto trucks.

Most of the people I know here either harvest cane or have cane fields that others harvest for them.

The cane is also good for kids to snack or teethe on!

Home Health

One of the pleasures of working here has been making some home visits.

Imagine an ER doctor saying that!

We have done dressing changes on a post-appendectomy patient, checked on an 80 year old who had fallen and broken some ribs and visited a man who suffered a cervical spine injury 25 years ago leaving him paraplegic.

Of course, the specific care each received is secondary.

More important is the effort displayed when making these visits. The graciousness of our patients in opening their homes to us has also been touching.

Wylie Smith, the doctor to work at the Patchacan Medical Cinic before me, has recently returned to America. He is trying to work in home visits in his practice in Dalton, Georgia. His efforts can be followed here.

Why we are here VI

More folks we are here to show and tell God's love to ...

Merry Christmas

Two of our favorite Christmas songs can be found here and here.

We love hearing the angels declare the birth of the King.

And we love pleading for God to come and free His people, through the birth of this King.

Merry Christmas from the O'Neill's.

LoC V - Christmas Outreach

Friday, we had some of the neighborhood kids over.

They made nativity scenes out of paper and finished TP rolls.

They made stars - representing the Star of Bethlemen.

They made snowflakes.

We showed them how the candy cane can be used to remember certain Christian truths, even if the cane wasn't invented to do this.

All of this was in addition to the wreaths from traced hands we made the week before.

And then we watched the new VeggieTales - Saint Nicholas.

Lots of holiday fun.

Christmas preparations

Just like at home, we are doing things to prepare for Christmas.

Charity is doing a Jesse Tree with the kids. Each night for four weeks, they do a bible reading and a craft as a reminder that our King has come giving us hope that he will do so again.

They have created a wreath (from our traced hands), to hang from the door. True, it doesn't match some Charity has made with some of the flora from around 781 Chase - but the one here is a little more personal.

We also have our own nativity scene - made from old TP rolls!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Celebrating Christmas is never a silly thing.

And though I could do without many of the things that change the celebration of Christs' birth into the "Holiday Season", some of the winter-related themes did indeed seem silly in warm Alabama.

For instance, Frosty the Snowman and icicles hanging from roofs seemed out of place when it would snow maybe once every couple of years.

Now imagine those same things that create a Winter Wonderland in Belize - where 70 degrees is considered cold.

Sure seems silly - though silly things can be nice when they remind you of home.