Our final day in Peralta working in the hospital. Sad to see it go by so fast. It was a quick trip, yet at the same time, it feels like it's been months since we first arrived. It's easy to lose yourself here. The people are amazing, the area is beautiful, and the work that we do is fulfilling. It's the little things too, like the coffee. I wish I could explain how much I love the coffee. They grow it here in the mountains, and the place we get it from (a guy named Chino) is an all organic farm that is some of the most expensive in the area. When they ship it out to the rest of the country and the world they import the coffee from all over the area and mix it together. So by the time we get coffee, even if you were to go buy organic Dominican coffee in the states, you would be getting a mixture of all different qualities. Here, it's pure, one of a kind, perfection. It's the smoothest most delicious coffee you've ever tasted. They also bring us this "hot chocolate" every morning, which is not like hot chocolate you are thinking of at the moment. It's basically liquified chocolate mixed with milk -- best way I can describe it. It's pretty much just amazing, and really hard to describe without tasting it. So we get that every morning too, and if you mix it with the coffee you kind of can get like a mocha. All throughout the day then they bring us coffee, so we were able to keep caffeinated and plow through all the surgeries. Since I'm on the topic, I'll describe the food a bit. Breakfast is usually some bread, peanut butter, processed meat and cheese. Simple. And coffee! Ok, moving on from coffee (I think you get the point). Lunch is usually rice and beans, some type of chicken, and some yucca, okra, mashed plantain, or some other banana creation that is fried or something. Dinner is pretty similar as well. They do quite a bit with banana, plantains, and yucca. The meals are all prepared by the pastor's family that the group that runs our logistics is partnered with. The logistics connection is called Del Camino Connection, or DCC, and that's where Henry and Alfredo work. So they handle all the lodging, travel (gas is like $5 a gallon here, was $7 a few months ago), food, water, etc. Anyway, so on our last day we had 5 surgeries. We did 3 adenoidectomies, 1 cleft lip revision (looks great now), and 1 bilateral ear keloid removal. We were supposed to have these two kids come in with bilateral cleft lip and palate disease, but we never found out what happened to them. I guess they talked to Wendy (one of our people in the DR) who had set it up and they were traveling from afar, but we lost contact. Hopefully in the future we can connect and help them. The day went really well though, again with no complications. Peter is an absolutely amazing surgeon, and really really humble about it. He continues to be a great teacher too, always looking for little tips to give me for my future as an ER doctor as well. I'll definitely be posting some pictures of the lip revisions that we did and you'll be able to see his artistic surgical skills as well. It's great to not only be able to provide surgical care that is helpful to these people, but also to provide top notch surgical repair. Like, he's the guy you would want to go to if you needed a facial plastic surgeon to repair something. That's what I love about working with Dr. Wang and the other's from Rush. We aren't providing sub-par care that is free, we are providing the best, most high quality health care available -- and otherwise, as mentioned before, these people would never receive any of it. It's really crazy how the system works because you can get a lot of health care here....if you have money. In the evening we drove back to Santo Domingo, which is a couple hours away, to spend the night and make the drive to the airport in the morning a little bit easier. We stopped at a local grocery store in Peralta first to buy some coffee, then once we hit Santo Domingo, Henry, Oscar, Peter, Stephanie and I all grabbed dinner at this chicken place. Chicken here is really quite amazing. Probably because it was clucking a few minutes before. Afterwards Henry dropped the three of us off at this little hotel, and we sat on the rooftop relaxing and talking about the trip. It was nice to relax and get to know each other a little more as well, talking about our travels and our future goals in global health and medicine. It's really awesome to work with like minded people who have great experience in this field, and both Stephanie and Peter have traveled extensively and have a lot of helpful input. I look forward to a future that involves working with both of them.
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