Clinic and Xia´ba

So Monday morning Sara and I met up early to head over to the clinic. We were not happy to find that the midwife was not up yet and she didn´t show up until 10am (way after we had gotten there). One of the interesting cases was a woman with a vague pain around her belly... during the examination we discovered she had an inguinal hernia. She did not have the money or the motives to go to a hospital so Ana gave her some plants to help. We still have not seen a birth and Lisa and I are considering staying at the clinic one night to help out... we´ll see if that happens. Monday afternoon my usual teacher was gone so I got a new one who is just awesome. I now want to switch teachers. I feel bad about hurting my current teacher´s feelings, but I am not learning anything more with him and this guy makes me work hard. I won´t know if this can happen until next Monday, but I hope it does.
Tuesday, Sara convinced me to get up early and study... and I felt really good about it too. My teacher gave me The Alchemist in Spanish in the afternoon and I spent a large portion of the night before going out reading it. It wasn´t that hard for me! (It´s also a super easy book according to most people, but I´m still proud). That night a bunch of us went to Gargolas and the funniest part of the night was trying to get Carolyn to dance with a Guatelatecan who´s friends all wanted him to dance with her... It involved me and the friend signalling to each other hahaha... they salsaed for one song before all of us were ready to go home for the night.
This morning, instead of going to the midwife clinic, we went to Xia´ba to work. Xia´ba is a community that used to be in a different area but was destroyed by Hurricane Stan and moved to its current place. (I went here my second day in Xela.) Dr. Christian runs a clinic out of a small storage room with chairs pushed together for the examining table. The patients are all woman and children with lots of pain and infections. The children are soo cute. However, after the clinic I was talking to the teacher I had on Monday about it and he gave me the other view of all these women and children. He said that many of the women in the community will just say they have pain and problems so that they can get the free medicine offered by us. It's actually a really common problem in all of Guatemala. Well, I guess this way they can have it when they need it?