We started our medical clinics at the Child Development Center 001, named "Ninos de Dios" or Children of God. Very fitting. We traveled about 50 minutes out of Santiago to a rural city called Moca, and worked in the school. We didn't go into the barrio or slums where the children came from. It was a little too dangerous to do that. I may try and get the team into a barrio over the next couple of days, but they are cramped, narrow, full of drug trafficking, prostitutes, and crime. A place of Forgotten Children. 
We saw 350 of His children today, and it was a great start!! The local team has done an outstanding job of getting the meds packaged, the tables, chairs, water, registration, interpretors, medical students, interns, dentist, spiritual counselors, and patient flow working without a hitch. Dental hygiene was the hit for the children, and the pharmacy ran like clock work.
It is very hot here, humid, and, overcast. The patients we saw were varied in complaints from joint pains, to severe vitamin deficiencies and sever anemia. We saw a little girl who had her fingers sliced open and had been taken to a local hospital to be sewn up with old silk thread and not told about follow up. When we saw her, her fingers were on the way to dying. We sent here to a better hospital and had her fingers saved. We saw a boy with severe vitamin deficiency and what I think is a variant of Marfan's Syndrome. The local people gave him a nick-name: "The Fish boy". He gets very high fevers and they have to put him in tubs of water to cool him off, thus the name "Fish boy". More rashes, scabies, and malnutrition.
We are moving along well, on this first day. We seem to be surrounded by Him. It's all good.
In all things give thanks,
David
