Blessings on the Mountain

Another amazing day at Mountain Top Ministries! The medical team is doing an incredible job serving the people that come to the clinic each day. It is wonderful to see how the team works together to help those in need. Above is a picture of a little girl waiting to be seen. It is such a blessing to be a part of this amazing ministry! 

I spent much of the day trying to organize inventory. It is somewhat of an overwhelming task! Just going through the various donations and trying to categorize items can take a significant amount of time.  It will be helpful to be on ground here in Haiti in order to help manage the inventory and be more deliberate in seeking specific supplies and donations that are needed. There is certainly no lack of work to do each day. 

Above is a pile of glucometers. We are trying to standardize this system. Much has been donated, but unfortunately we often do not have the matching strips OR we have the strips, but no matching glucometer. It is a continual challenge, but we are receiving some good feedback on ways to solve this problem.

We have this amazing inventory system that another team provided. It is a great program, but things have not always been scanned in and out simply due to the learning curve of adapting to a new system. Batteries go down on the laptop or scanner (there's no electricity at the clinic) and then it is written down, but possibly not entered later. This is understandable with a different team each week and some team members coming their first trip. 

Sometimes the items are not being re-shelved properly and then they are pulled off in an area where there isn't a bar code to scan it out. We can see up to 1000 patients in the week, so things get busy and hectic quickly. We can show a large amount of certain medications in our inventory system that we may not have at all if the medications have not been logged out properly. This is something we are working on and feel like we are making great progress. 

I spent much of the day moving things to one location in the clinic. There are things that we have in 4 or 5 different locations (upstairs and downstairs). There should only be one official location, but somehow things get moved around. We are discussing that possibly we need a couple of different locations for certain items that are frequently used, but then we will restock that area at the end of the day in order to prevent the problem of multiple locations for various things. It's hard to control inventory when we do not even know where everything is or where it should be. One of the most challenging things is when we search and search for something that we absolutely KNOW that we have a ton of, but we cannot find it. Inevitably we find it on the last day of the clinic, but by then the patient is long gone.

It feels good to walk down the mountain at the end of the day and come home to happy and healthy family. Some of our kids go up to the clinic with me each day to help out. Julia helped today in the pharmacy passing out medications and also in inventory. Christelle, David, and Talitha helped yesterday. Billy, Julia, and Roseminique helped the day before. 

We rotate who goes up with me (mostly the older kids). The rest stay with Amanda who is doing an amazing job homeschooling and showing the kids the love of the Lord. It is not always an easy task! We are so thankful to have her with us for another 6 weeks. She will return to the states November 13th. Please pray for the Lord's leading as we seek homeschooling help during the day for when Ron and I (and our older kids) are serving at the ministry.