Clinic - health survey

6 years ago I never would have dreamed that God would have us opening a clinic. Amazing how He moves us in baby steps and puts his vision so strongly in us that we are willing to go headlong into something that we know nothing about! :) 

The construction of the actual clinic building was the easy part - Tristan's great at construction and, although at the time it sounded hard, it was nothing compared to now - figuring out how to actually get it open. We are crunching numbers and working hard to lay a good foundation so that it is a healthy and strong clinic in the future. 

We have defined our ministry zone - 60 km squared (25 miles squared for those of you that don't know KM). There are at least 15,000 people in that area and we estimate that they will be using our clinic. that a lot.  Then the questions have been, how many Dr's and medical personnel do we need to serve that amount of people, how much and what kinds of medicine, etc. There have been tons of questions!

God has brought some wonderful people into our lives that are teaching and guiding us as we attempt to become experts in this area. We have found friendships in directors of 2 thriving, missionary clinics in the city of Comayagua and they are so gracious to answer all my questions and point me in the right direction. 

Our biggest need at the moment is a clinic director - must be Honduran and must be a licensed doctor... and must be willing to work for what we can afford - not much. 

One big thing we really thought we need to do in order to prepare to do great clinic work was perform a health survey. So we had 8 youth that we know come for a week and we went door to door for 5 full days doing a health survey. we need a sample size of 400 people in order to get an accurate understanding of the health tendencies. This will help us know what medicines to have in the pharmacy, what the biggest needs are, what percentage of families have no latrines or cement floors, etc. 

It has taken months of prep work- creating the survey, figuring out our area, how we will actually do a survey, etc. The survey ended up being 5 pages long and included taking the persons blood sugar level, temperature, BMI, blood pressure, as well as lots of questions. 

We split the kids into groups of 2 and armed them with a backpack full of all the tools they needed as well as a computer. In that first week we did 203 surveys throughout the valley and the mountain side - performing the survey in each 4th house. It was a fun and tiring week - we felt like youth pastors again as we hung out with these 8 kids, playing and laughing and teasing, etc. After that, we had some local kids out doing the survey in the areas that we hadn't done yet - and have now completed our entire area. Now we are just waiting on the results which we should have in the next few weeks! This will give us the information we need to know which medicines we will need to stock, and how we can best serve the health needs of our communities. 

 our surveyors were almost always welcomed with open arms and given lots of gifts of snacks and drinks. what generous people we have around us!