Scotts on a Mission

I think I mentioned this before, but we try to accommodate everyone who wants to go out on a water filter delivery run. It equips them to be better able to deliver the message back home during fundraising efforts, and it's also a chance to get out of the clinic area and see a little bit more of the country. Unfortunately, by Thursday, we were in a little bit of trouble with our delivery schedule. Tuesday morning had not gone as planned, so the members of that group hadn't visited anyone's homes. And the group that was supposed to go out on Wednesday morning didn't, because of the chaos (read the previous post!). Ken spoke with Dr. Mike and got his permission to have not just one, but two makeup delivery sessions on Thursday. This was a big deal, because Thursday was our second and last day in Tacachico, and we didn't want to fall even more behind than we already were. Here's the morning group heading out, complete with Dr. Mike! I think everyone alway...

Wednesday was a little rough. We deliberately woke up early because Tacachico is over an hour away from Sacacoyo. We were all ready to go, but the truck to carry our luggage broke down or something and was very late. Over an hour late, I think. It was nice to hang out on the retreat center grounds, but we were all antsy to get going. The girls, spending some time relaxing. We finally got on our way, but when we got close to our destination, we got a little lost, adding another 30 - 40 minutes to our drive. I probably have my specific times wrong, but the net result was that we had intended on arriving around 9:00 am, but didn't get there until around 10:30 instead. Upon our arrival, we found that the power was out to the entire town! The sisters have this great backup generator, but unfortunately, it ran for about 10 minutes before giving up the ghost. Ken, Rick and I fiddled with it for a long time trying to get it working, but it was an industrial computer-contr...

I spent most of Tuesday driving around with water filter deliveries, but I wanted to share a few other photos I managed to capture throughout the day. First of all, here are a few photos of a family that you can keep in your prayer intentions. They came to clinic on Monday, where one of our providers found out that they had recently been traveling through Mexico and one of the members of the family - a ten year old girl - had disappeared. I'm not clear on the relationship, whether it was the older woman's daughter or what, but she was obviously completely distraught and was asking us for any help we could give. The family came back the next day, and the mother appeared to be much more composed, so I can only pray that she had received some hope somehow. At any rate, she had brought the whole family along, and she wanted lots of printed photos, which I was happy to provide. It made me realize that family photos aren't just nice mementos, they can actually be crucial in c...

We had two water filter trips scheduled for Tuesday. In the morning, we loaded 50 filters into the bus and headed back to Caluco, where we had clinic on our first day on the ground (Saturday). When we arrived, we found out there had been a slight miscommunication with the local coordinators. We were not actually scheduled to go out to people's houses. Instead, we attended the training session that was given to the volunteers, who would then be responsible for taking the filters out into the community. We stacked up all the filters outside the church entrance and I asked father to bless them, which he was happy to do. Many of our translators are from the "American School", a private K-12 school in El Salvador that uses English exclusively. This is considered to be the best school in the country, so these kids are coming from the most privileged families in El Salvador. The school has a requirement that its high school students log 150 hours of community service...