So far, we seldom had a boring day at Diospi Suyana. To illustrate this I would like to tell you a bit about my (Steven) past Wednesday.

At 7.45 in the morning me and my colleagues from HR had a meeting at the Diospi school with all the teachers because of a change in contracts. A good 2,5 hours later I arrived at the hospital and in preparation for another meeting I was planning to quickly have some breakfast, a mueslibar and a cup of coffee. As I was about to take my first bite I received a call from a colleague: ”mister Steven, are you in the hospital? We have a patient that urgently needs blood, could you come down to donate blood?”. I put down my mueslibar, sent a message to postpone the meeting and I went down.

Once I got to the bloodbank they were already working with some other colleagues also donating blood for this patient. When it was almost my turn I realised that I might not be the best idea to donate without having had breakfast. In the Netherlands I almost passed out once and then it was only a couple of tubes. So I quickly ate some crackers and drank some water and then I was good to go. During the 10 minutes that I was donating a nurse came running in twice almost begging for more blood. This patient was really in bad shape. At moments like that I realise that in fact I am no longer working in an office of PwC. As I am working on my computer upstairs, regularly my colleagues are trying to save someone’s life downstairs.

Donating blood

After donating blood the next meeting could begin and again an important subject. A couple of weeks ago we started with the implementation of a new ERP-system om the hospital. That might not mean a lot to you but believe me, there is a lot involved with an implementation like this. After a lot of preperation, mainly by some of my colleagues from system management, we went live on February 1. The past week has been quite tough because new problems kept on surfacing. It might not sound that interesting but when patients cannot leave because their bills cannot be generated or when a doctor cannot prescribe a certain medication because the system wrongly shows that we have a stock of 0, it gets quite intensive quite rapidly. After the first couple of days it was time to make some decisions on how to proceed. That was up to me and that was what the meeting was for.

Training on the new system

After this meeting there was some time to relax as it was time for lunch. We usually buy our lunch at the hospital as it is cheap and often tasty. Wednesday was my lucky day as Ceviche was on the menu. This is a typically Peruvian dish that basically consists of raw fish that is slightly cooked by very acid lime juice. Toss in some raw onion, sweet potatoe and roasted corn and you make my day. With the lunch in hand I walked up to our house to spend a bit of time with Vikki. 

Ceviche

When I got back to the hospital I ran in to the ladies of the bloodbank and I asked them if they had any further information on the patient for which we had donated blood earlier. She was still in surgery because they were having a difficult time to stop the internal bleeding. The blood that me and my colleagues had donated in the morning had by then already been used and it was still not enough. By now the patient is stable but her situation can change quickly and unfortunately the prognosis is not good.

Three other patients were brought in on the same day that had been involved in a car accident. It was a family with parents of about 65 years old and three children of about 30. They were on their way back from a funeral of a family member when their car went of the road and fell down about 200 metres. The driver (one of the children) came out quite ok because of the air bags but the mother died there. The father and the two other children were brought to the hospital. By now the children are doing a bit better and the father has been transported to the hospital in Cusco. What a drama.

In spite of all the misery that we sometimes come across in a single day, the hospital is a special place to work. Upon hearing such stories one might wonder; why does God allow all of this to happen? Although I do not have a satisfying answer to that question, we do see in the hospital of Diospi Suyana that God is present, also in suffering.

God is faithful