First Class of First-Aid

Last Friday we taught an awesome first aid class to 15 + women in Nueva Esperanza. We have a friend who is a Med student here in Santa Cruz who was supposed to help us teach the class, but last minute (11:30 p.m. the night before) he backed out. Thank you, friend. I guess you could say we were a little frantic the next morning trying to pull everything together. Carmen, our Bolivian side-kick, wasn’t going to be able to come with us either because she too had a class to teach in another community (23 de Octubre), so were on our own.

A wrong bus ride and a lost taxi driver later we made it to our humble open-air chapel to teach the class. We used a manikin to teach CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver to the women and each of them had the opportunity to practice their mad life-saving skills on Little Anne (the manikin). Afterwards, we taught general first-aid care which included the following topics: skin infections, fever, diarrhea, dehydration, snake bites, chagas (a common parasite), bleeding, etc.

Apparently the class was a success because we were asked to teach two more classes to a group of boy scouts. Wish us luck!

a seizure and a cemetery, fruit and some empanadas (not necessarily in that order)

Last weekend, we headed to the local (and infamous) Fería de Frutas (Fruit Fair). The Fería is an annual event held in La Guardia, the municipality home to the communities we visit every day, so of course we wanted to support. We began the day by making delicious empanadas (filled with local Menonite cheese) with Carmen.

On the bus ride to La Guardia, Amanda got a chance to save the day and get some serious nurse training. A man in the bus suddenly began having a grand mal seizure, and nobody on the bus knew him or knew what to do. As I assured the bus ¨¡Ella es enfermera!¨ (She´s a nurse!), Amanda worked on keeping the man´s airway open while trying to get him conscious using some pain stimulus after the seizure ended. In the meantime, I worked on convincing the bus driver (who didn´t even stop the bus) that the man needed to get to the hospital. The guy was in bad shape, and luckily we did manage to stage a quick exchange when both the bus and an ambulance pulled over on the side of the road as the two drivers dragged the man into the front seat of the ambulance (banging his head on the way out), and strapped him in like an average passenger. We hope the man is ok. Also, Amanda is a rockstar.


To recover from this traumatic experience, we gawked at, bought, and ate lots of fruit. Check out all those beautiful orange colors!

I have a strange love of all things cemetery, so Amanda indulged me and we spent way too long in the La Guardia cemetery. So awesome.

Peace and Moises

This 14-year old young man is pretty much our best friend here in Bolivia. His mother is enrolled in Jhon's Micro Enterprise class in the community of Nueva Esperanza, and we love to hang out with him every Monday and Wednesday night. It seems like every time we find ourselves in Nueva Esperanza, Moises pops out of the woodwork and tags along with us. Unfortunately, Moises is dealing with some complex personal and family obstacles, and is not always in the best of environments for him to develop socially, physcially, and emotionally. We are currently working with his family, using our social work and nursing backgrounds, and while Ascender is not designed to provide the medical or counseling help this family needs, we are helping them in whatever way we can and hooking them up with local social service resources.

p.s. Don't mind the peace signs. He thought it was cool.