Back to School!

I was back at the school today with the kids. My favorite. I originally wanted to check hemoglobin levels of the kids, and then I thought, why in the heck would I want to be the mean nurse?! So instead, I got to be the nurse who checked their mouths for sores, caries and rotting; their skin, nails and hands for signs of nutrition deficiency and their hair for lice. Luckily, I only found a few kids with lice eggs and no crawling lice so that was really good compared to the school last week. I ended up loving my job. I think you can't really go that wrong though with these cute kids. They are seriously adorable.














There was this one child in particular, David, I think that he was about 5 or 6, but the size of a 3 or 4 year-old, that I just fell in LOVE with. Maybe it was because his cross-eyes reminded me of one of my very own favorite brothers, C.J., when he was little, I don't know, but he won my heart. He just kind of hung out around us all day. He would open up the bandaids for us, or just chill with us. I love him. One of my biggest disappointments of the day is that I didn't ever get a picture of him! I am so bummed about that.
Oh wait! I just found a picture that my friend Tricia took with him in it! I present you my new best friend DAVID!!! He's the middle guy. Don't you love him? Seriously the kid is a whiz.

Honestly, who knew that checking for lice and cavities could be so fun! I learned quickly to tell the girls that they were bonita or guapa (beautiful) and they would blush and giggle and love it, and to tell the boys they had cool hair or something, because if you even say the word guapo with them, the whole rest of line of boys would start chanting "feo! feo! feisimo!" etc. (ugly!). Oh boys! The boys were probably my favorites though. For some reason, I always have kind of liked the trouble-maker kids, they are just hillarious to me! Here is the group of boys that were kind of making trouble in the long line for hemoglobin checks that I embarrassed by making them sing songs to me for stickers.

Like I said before, lice actually wasn't a real problem at this school, but their teeth, oh man! So sad! Not only did a lot of them have several visible caries, they were numerous kids (probably 1 out of 4) with incredibly rotten teeth. With some of them, you could actually see the gum sticking up out of the middle of where the tooth should be, and just a ring of a "tooth" around the gum. It made my mouth hurt every time. I am a mouth baby.

At the end of the day as we left, we taught them to do high-5s on our way out. The kids LOVED it! The teachers. . . maybe not so much. They all followed us out to the ambulance though and waved until we were out of sight. I will miss them. After clinical, we went out on the Malecon with some of the girls and our 3 professors to look for nativities. I found a really pretty traditional Ecuadorian-looking one. Come over for Christmas and I will share it with you. Then we went out to dinner again at "Cafe Rio." It's good food, but I some real Cafe Rio would definitely hit the spot about right now. Then we had class in our professors' room (that is always a fun classroom setting) and it's time to get ready for the morning again.