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!