Sometime in January the rains  taper off into what they call the “dry season” which is not so much dry as perhaps less wet, maybe getting some showers once or twice a week.  Locals say that the wet and dry seasons have traditionally arrived like clockwork, within days from year to year but now there is less definition and the timing is more variable.  In any case the last month as been as wet as you can imagine, a couple of weeks ago the Georgetown area received 8 inches of rain over a 72 hour period and it just keeps falling.

Last week I had a call to pick up a two year old that had been suffering from seizures and had lost consciousness, the weather was cloudy but not too bad where I was but just a few miles out I encountered heavy rain, once overhead I could see the airstrip but upon turning final the sheets of water on the windshield obscured the forward visibility too much to land.  I circled in the area for about 15 minutes waiting for a break in the rain and there finally was one for just a couple of minutes and I was able to land where almost immediately the downpour resumed.  It was raining so hard that the water was pooled up to 1″ deep on the airstrip and when taxiing the wing left a distinct rainshadow effect on the surface of the water.  The truck was waiting and with umbrellas we loaded up the patient being held by his mother and a nurse from the clinic to monitor him.  The takeoff was another display of aquatics as we escaped the spray and drag of the standing water and climbed out on course for the capitol, with better weather ahead I planned to level off at 7,500 feet and sure enough as we passed 7,000 we came out into bright sunshine.  But just as I was leveling off the nurse signaled me that the little boy had stopped breathing and then a few minutes later indicated that he had died.  At this point there was no point in continuing on, it would be far better to return them so he could be buried in his home village, as his mother cried and held him tightly I sadly I turned back into the rain for the rapid descent to the airstrip.  Thankfully the rain had eased up to a light shower but it was particularly dark and gloomy with the change in events. Holding his small body as the mother climbed out of the airplane may have been one of the saddest things I have ever experienced.

As noted in the previous post we have had a lot of rain lately, while yesterday it had let up in Georgetown here in the Northwest near Venezuela it continued to pour from 3 am on.  By around noon it had eased up to light rain we were out of regular gas so I had to make a run for some, not as easy as it may sound.  Gasoline here is “imported” in drums from a neighboring country in small boats, I went in search of my favoured licensed fuel vendor with my empty exchange drum, he only had it down by the waterfront so I had to drive through the narrow pathway between the vegetable vendors where several of us managed to push the drum up a small plank into the back of our Arctic Cat.  From there we stopped at the boat where we siphoned off 15 gallons to top it off and then on to the house but before we could get that far I got a text message from Karen that there was a medevac over at Baramita so we hurried back so I could get on my way.

It was still raining lightly but the satellite suggested that the cloud intensity should decrease as the day went on, weather in Gtn was good (with the flooding) but I couldn’t get a report from Baramita.  I loaded up a nurse and headed out, the weather was mixed, some rain but reasonable visibility and at the destination we had to dodge some low clouds to get lined up on final.  P1030587 Clearly it had really rained a lot here as there was water and mud everywhere as we slid to a mucky stop in front of the clinic.  Inside the patient was hanging in a hammock tied on a pole that was wedged out the window on one end and on a ledge at the other.  She had suffered a miscarriage early that morning and had still not birthed the placenta so she definitely needed to get out to the hospital.  A couple of men carried her out to the plane and got her mostly in with the pole still attached and then we untied the hammock and just laid her on the floor inside of it like a blanket.By the time we reached Georgetown and got the patient into an ambulance it was too late to make it back home so I had to stay over in Georgetown.  The next morning I had the nurse and another 400 pounds of meds to deliver to Matthews Ridge on the way back.

In Guyana we normally have two rainy seasons, around Christmas and again in May/June, this last week however has been an anomaly, in Georgetown they received eight inches in 72 hours, that of course leads to flooding, this is what the city airport looked like Tuesday;

And today after the water came down a bit…

Just trying to remember exactly what all transpired last week.

Notably the cement work was completed for the site at Baramita, that was made possible through some very generous donations of materials and highly subsidized labour from the contractor that was working on a couple of other projects in the community.  All materials arrive by air or by a very complicated and expensive series of boat and bush truck transportation so the donated materials are much more valuable than just the base cost alone.

The building contractor and his foreman

Just a recap of the flights for the week; we were in Gtn for a few days, I had plans to dig into the shipping container for the thickness planer that we have not had an opportunity to use yet but now we need it to plane the lumber for the building in Baramita.  It was in a well constructed plywood crate in the back of the container and when I unscrewed the lid I could see a pile of what looked like planer chips but when I scooped up a handful they were waxy chunks of rubber or plastic.  Closer investigation revealed that the two drive rollers in the top of the planer had completely disintegrated from the heat and/or humidity just leaving two bare steel shafts. We are constantly amazed the effects of this equatorial environment on almost everything.  Fortunately a friend is coming down in a few days and will bringing a $400 (ouch), set of replacement rollers.

We were still in Georgetown on Wednesday when at 11:30pm my phone rang, it was the Doctor from Matthews Ridge and they had a woman with multiple stab wounds to the chest and wanted me to come and get her in the morning.  Fact was that our fuel account was down to just a few liters so I had no plans for flights until we had some more fuel money come in but I said yes anyway not quite sure how we would work it out.  It seems I needn’t have concerned myself with that, early in the morning I moved the plane over to the pumps in the dark just as the attendant was opening them up, when I asked him how much fuel we had I was still trying to figure out how we were going to make the flight when he told me we had 800 liters!  That sounds like a lot but we actually  use between 2,000 and 3,000 liters per month but nonetheless we had plenty to make the medevac.

The LaBore family is away on furlough, I think they were enjoying the midwest, midwinter deepfreeze but the last word is they have moved on to sunny California, I suppose this will be the beginning of their re-acclimatization process for returning to Guyana.

Without Laura to share the flying duties it has been pretty busy, 120 flight hours since they left in December and 65 just since the beginning of the year.  Flights included at least a dozen medevacs, mostly with multiple patients, one with the 206 included a man with severe head trauma, a two year old suffering from seizures along with his mother, a four year old in a coma thought to be from malaria and his mother (he later died from a type of meningitis and I flew his body home).  On that same flight was a woman in distress from what they thought was a cardiac condition and a nurse to oversee them all.  My last medevac was on Thursday, two maternity cases, from Mabaruma there was a woman 42 weeks pregnant with her 10th child and we stopped in Moruca for another maternity case, she was suffering from seizures about every 20 minutes.  Patient seizing during the flight She had one episode on the way and then a couple more after we were on the ground and had to wait for an hour for an ambulance.  Lately the city of Georgetown has had a shortage of working ambulances.

On an exciting note the community outreach house in Baramita is coming along.  I was there earlier in the week, the Cutman or Sawman was out in the jungle with his chainsaw working on his 6,000 board feet of lumber and the local construction crew was setting the foundation bases and steel to get ready to cast the concrete.  The local crew is only completing the foundation so we still need some help with the framing and completion!!!Yesterday we heard that there was a replica pirate ship sailing into the Waini River Mouth a few miles down from Mabaruma so we took the boat down yesterday afternoon to check it out.  It is part of a BBC special that is supposed to air this fall, they have eight kids (selected from 16,000 applicants!) that are doing a five week adventure in different parts of the Caribbean/South America.  We were able to go on board and visit with the crew and the Minister of Tourism for Guyana that was also visiting the ship.  I think the boys would have been quite happy to stay on board as stowaways if they could have!

The Baramita mission base is underway, local workers have cleared the land alongside the airstrip for the construction of a house to provide accommodation for project workers and other visiting volunteers.  A construction crew is scheduled to complete the concrete foundation and columns by the end of January and then we will need a volunteer team to spend a couple of weeks constructing the wood frame building.  We hope to have a “Cutman” begin cutting the required lumber in the jungle nearby the site for the majority of the building.

Please contact us soon if you would like to volunteer or better yet organize a group to come spend some time with us to get this important project underway as soon as possible.

Thursday December 23, I was asked to make a trip for the local government to help them complete some year end transactions.  I had to leave very early but as always I called the hospital to see if they had any patients to transport, they had one and they asked me to bring the oxygen along for him.  I got to the plane in the gathering morning light to see that fog banks were moving in and out from the airstrip but the weather above looked pretty good.  The ambulance brought the frail, elderly patient and also disgorged about a dozen others, mostly young people.  After we got the patient comfortable in the back seat I realized that the fog had again moved over the strip so we would have to wait a few minutes for it to clear again. I went to talk with the man and discovered that with the exception of his wife all of the others were children and grandchildren and there were many more.  I had a sense that they were all there to say goodbye, I had them gather around for a picture with him.

Sadly the next day I learned that he had died at the hospital in Georgetown and the family hoped that I could return his body to Mabaruma for burial because of the Christmas holidays however the next date that the funeral home was open would be Tuesday so we planned for that.  With the assistance of Amerindian Affairs things were organized during the holidays and I was able to pick up the body along with two of his sons for the flight back.  When I got to Mabaruma the Dr. called to say that there was a one year old with a snake bite over in Baramita and could I pick up some meds from Matthews Ridge because they were having an outbreak of vomiting and diarrea.  Providentially I had already planned on taking some Guyana elections officials to Baramita anyway so we loaded them up.  I flew low over the village at Matthews Ridge so they would know that I had arrived but we still waited for about 20 minutes before a pickup truck sped down the dusty road to meet us.  I was grateful for the space in the 206, with 4 passengers I was still able to put about 6 boxes of meds in the back and belly pod along with the supplies for the passengers and still not be even close to gross weight.

On arrival at Baramita I was able to get a look at the site for the future (soon!), site of the Wings for Humanity satellite base for community outreach and ministry workers.  On the ground the baby with the snake bite was being held by his mother he had been bitten on the hip/thigh which makes me think he had probably been just sitting in the ground at the time.  There was no determination as to what type of snake and the mother only spoke Carib so there was very little information forthcoming from her.  Of course she was in distress over the condition of her son, she just walked across the seats to sit down and meanwhile the Health Worker came out, he had just been on the radio and now there was a medical emergency back at Mabaruma.  Fortunately I was headed that way anyway to have the baby assessed by the doctor so off we went along with three others that just wanted to go that direction.

At Mabaruma we discovered that the patient was an older man that had suddenly become unconscious while travelling down the river in his canoe so his son had paddled on to Mabaruma and now he was basically comatose, the doctor suspected Meningitis.  As I would only have three adults and the baby I switched to the smaller Cessna 182 for the flight to Georgetown, while we loaded the elderly man the doctor assessed the baby, with no meds or lab in Mabaruma there was really no choice but to send him to Georgetown too.  The flight to Georgetown is just over an hour, the ambulance service had been called before we left but it seems that the city has only one ambulance in service, for the whole city!  There were more but something has happened to them, anyway we waited for nearly an hour before I just had a station wagon taxi come out to the airplane and we loaded them up and sent them that way.  Unfortunately due to the time waiting and the fact that the nurse needed to travel back with me we got too late and had to stay overnight in Georgetown.  It is not too uncommon for me to leave home early in the morning for a “quick” flight only to end up stuck overnight in Georgetown or elsewhere.  Still waiting for the outcome for both patients.

Opportunities to sit and record events without interruption are few but today I am sitting on the steps of the school at Baramita after spending the night in my hammock and I am now looking out at the thick fog that is enveloping the airstrip.  I flew in yesterday afternoon with some Regional officials who are planning a community meeting later this morning and it seems that I now can sit and record my thoughts…shouldn’t take long.

Things have been a bit of a whirlwind for the last few weeks, we had a dental team visit from the US and Canada, there was a lot to do to prepare for their arrival and providing the logistics for them while they were here.  The team was organized by New Reality International, a non-profit that organizes medical and relief groups to various underprivileged countries, particularly Haiti of late.  We really appreciated NRI, they were completely prepared for the dental work they had to do, all we had to do was the transportation, food and other logistics for them to be here in Guyana.

Well earned water coconuts

They came prepared to work too, this was no holiday!  After a red-eye into Georgetown on Sunday then flights with Wings for Humanity aircraft into the interior of Guyana they began seeing patients that same day.  Right through Wednesday they were in Baramita when we flew them over to Mabaruma then Thursday morning we had them loaded in the Wings for Humanity riverboat for the 30 mile trip up the river to the villages of Hotoquai and Hobodeia.  Friday the team split with some going up the river again to the school at Sacred Heart while some stayed to work in the dental clinic in Mabaruma.  There the one Dentist working with the local Dentex extracted over 90 teeth in the one day.  In all they saw over 400 patients and extracted 700 badly decayed teeth in just 5 ½ days of working.  Watch for the next issue of the Adventist World Aviation Flightlog for the whole story.

Looking across the airstrip I can also see the future site of the Wings for Humanity base for here in Baramita, the village council has granted us permission to establish a base here and has already cleared the land for us.  We now need to move ahead quickly to start construction so if any readers feel the urge to come and help build or fund the building we would like to hear from you!  It won’t be a complicated building, the most difficult part will be getting the materials together and I have already started working on that.

Click here to download the Fall Flight Log from Adventist World Aviation, Jacob has related his experience of riding along on a medivac flight.

http://www.flyawa.org/site/1/docs/FL2010Fallcolor.pdf

For more pictures from our Facebook account click here or copy and paste into your browser (you don’t need a facebook account to view);

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