February 3, 2010

The other day, Tarynn and I arrived at the Infa and found that Yesmin was crying. I asked what was going on, but Yesmin refused to fit words between her sobs and the other kids hadn’t been able to tell me either. Finally Isabel explained that last night, she was bit by a bug and her arm was swelling. Isabel wrote me a note for the doctor and I rushed her over to the clinic. Her sister had caught the bug and she put it in a jar. I was so scared for Yesmin because her arm looked so swollen and there was a dark spot where the bug bit her. We sat in the waiting room for a while and I was uncomfortable until Yesmin finally started relaxing. After some time, she said that it was feeling better… but her arm was still extremely swollen and it still hurt a little. Do you remember the doctor that cut off whatever it was that Laura had in her thumb? Do you remember how sketchy he was? Well, the same one ended up looking at Yesmin’s arm. It made me nervous, but I’m not sure if he helps the kids for free, so I prayed for the best. We went into his office and he was eating a doughnut. He asked her some questions and then he took medicine, put some bottled water in it and mixed it around. Then he took another bottle of medicine and poured the first bottle into the second. He spilled some on the desk and some on the chair and just wiped it off with his doughnut napkin. Then he put some of the medicine in a spoon and gave it to Yesmin. After she took it, he stuffed the spoon into a box of medicne and gave it to her. He said after she takes the medicine for a month, she has to go to the hospital to take a test (does he seem sketchy to anyone else too? … thankfully she seemed to be doing better the rest of the day). She wanted to see her mom afterwards and so I took her to the restaurant that her mom worked at. Her mom gave me a guava drink and because I was ready to start cooking on my skin, I accepted. When I was heading back to the Infa, I saw two brothers, Christian and Hector, who used to go to the Infa. They’re definitely kids that need to go and so I asked them to come with me to the Infa. After bribing them with my drink and chocolate that my family gave me to pass out, Hector agreed to come. Christian, on the other hand, said that he did not want to go and ran the other way down some street. Hector said that one of the other boys told them they weren’t aloud to go back to the Infa. That made me angry, but I figured I could deal with it later. At least Hector is coming now. Sometimes we’ve heard that volunteers have resorted to bribing the kids to come and I’m not against the idea at all. They need to come and I’ve got the chocolate to encourage that to happen.