Tuesday, November 07, 2006

From the logbook...

Today I flew to two villages. First I went to Ayuy (I-U-EEE) to get a patient, and then to Makuma to bring out some bible translators. Below you will see a bit of what Ayuy is like, and what it can be like to live there.
Here is what school in the jungle usually looks like. It is just a simple wooden building with all the kids from the village inside. They did come out for recess while I was there and there was probably 25 of them, ranging from 1rst grade to 5th. For those of you that were wondering, the flag is the Ecuadorian flag.

The man on the left is the dad of the patient that I brought out. He is walking to the hospital to be with his daughter. He said he should be there by tommorow afternoon. He is holding the boys pet mouse/rabbit thingy. I forgot what they called it in the Shuar language, and I know there is a name in Spanish, but I forgot it as well. The little boys dad is the one with the rifle. It is an old style flint lock gunpowder rifle. I asked them what they were hunting and they said "whatever." And then of course there is the mom with her trusty machete. They use those things for more than you would imagine.


This is a jungle stretcher. The girl I flew out is inside the blanket, as though she was a dead pig or something. She was unable to walk, so therefore some men of the village had to bring her out this way. It took them about an hour to bring her to the plane, and finally we were off to our second stop of Makuma. The patient was a girl of 15 years, and she was in a lot of pain and scared to leave. She was originally scheduled to leave to have a checkup after breaking both of her legs. I don't know all the story, but her legs didn't work after some time without the casts, and she had many other problems as well, which her dad thought he needed to show me.

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