My Week as a Make-Shift Pharmacist

A lot has happened in the past week. I have been trying to think of the best way to get the whole week down into one post and I just don’t think I can do it. I’ll keep it simple then.

My mom and I volunteer (mostly my mom) for a nonprofit called Refuge International who has clinics set up in three different villages in Guatemala. There are three week-long trips to each location every year, and during that time the volunteer group sees patients of all kinds from surrounding areas, they perform surgeries, and provide medication (hopefully enough to last the patient until our next visit). That is the simple version. Refuge also heads projects to drill clean water wells in various villages across the country, to deworm the entire population of the country over the course of a few years, and to get children like Misael (whose feet were turned almost completely backwards from birth) to Scottish Rite in the United States for corrective surgery so they can return home to live their lives more normally and to help their families.

So you probably guessed this is mostly a medical thing. If you know me at all, you know my medical experience doesn’t reach much past my ability to put on a Band-Aid and take allergy medicine twice a day. They found a place for me though. The pharmacy is set up in such a way that really anyone can do it. So I did. For a whole week I was a make-shift pharmacist. I counted thousands upon thousands of white pills, pink pills, orange pills, bright blue pills, pills for diabetes or high blood pressure, pills for pills that smell like they could kill everything in your body that isn’t supposed to be there and maybe even a few things that are. I counted them all. I counted them, bottled them, bagged them, labeled them and then I explained (IN SPANISH) how to take them, when to take them, what to take them with and why you are taking them in the first place. Did I mention I have no medical experience whatsoever? I learned a LOT this week.

So that’s it. For the sake of simplicity and brevity and preserving everyone’s sanity, I’m not going to write anything else about that. I probably passed out drugs to between 400 and 500 people this week. It doesn’t sound like a whole lot when you think about it terms of the quantities of customers passing through an American pharmacy on any given day, but this was a little different.

I’ll get my act together and tell a few medical stories from the week here in the next few days.