The clinic opened officially on June 3! We haven't advertised yet but neighborhood people are starting to come. We have a sliding scale fee system based on income per family member, and so the majority of Romanians will pay very little for medical consultations. The average monthly take-home pay here has increased in the last year to $109/month, and with our fee schedule a family with 2 parents, both earning the average amount, and 2 children will pay about $1 for a visit. So, obviously we will need Western patients to pay our bills. For the time being, we are relying on your donations to pay our employees!
Our nursing staff, receptionist and social worker are great gals. We are going through the Saline Solution videotapes together. This is a series designed by the Christian Medical and Dental Society to teach not only how but why to bring our faith into our medical encounters in an effective and inoffensive manner. It's very interesting that not going to church on a regular basis has proven to be a health risk factor! Now there have been over a 100 studies on the relationship between spirituality and health. Frequency of church attendance is the easiest factor to measure so that's what most of the studies use, although some studies have actually looked at more important issues including the depth of one's Christian faith. Frequent church attenders recover from heart attacks and surgery faster and have a much lower risk of dying after a heart attack. Even frequent church attenders who smoke have better health than smoking non-church attenders. So it is not just the difference in life style! That makes it almost malpractice to not tell a patient about the benefits of faith.
The parking lot is coming along. It will look very nice when it is finished. Yesterday a cement truck backed in to the parking area to unload concrete and in the process knocked down one of the concrete posts for our front fence! The parking lot crew will fix it within a few days, so that we can lock up the front securely once again. So today, we parked outside the gate in front of our building and someone hit our car when they were pulling into the parking spot in front of our car--just a dent in the front fender. Whoever did it drove off without saying anything. Tomorrow Milt has to go to the police to make a report--without this we can't get it fixed.
Tomorrow afternoon will be a special time! We will be witnesses in the civil wedding ceremony for our friend Gabi Talabur and her fiance Ambrose Kibos. The church wedding is on Sunday. Gabi is one of the four founding members of our foundation, Fundatia Medicala "Usa Deschisa" (Open Door Medical Foundation). She is now in her 3rd year of Family Practice residency and will be working with us during this next year. She is officially assigned to a clinic across town, but they said she could just stay home and study and they would stamp her papers at the end of the year stating that she had completed all the requirements (typical here). Ambrose is from Kenya, attended medical school here and did well enough to get into a cardiology residency on a scholarship! This is quite impressive!
For much of the last week, Milt and Dragos and both of our nurses worked across town with a short term medical team from a church in Tennessee. They needed Romanian doctors (Dragos and Milt) to work with them in order to be legal. They had shipped 4500 pairs of new eyeglasses, mainly bifocals, and also brought with them a lot of medications and supplies. Their team was split into an eyeglass team, a medical team, as well as a youth ministry outreach. Milt saw many old people with very limited pensions. Many of them had problems for which there is no cure or effective treatment. They didn't have medicines for all the different kinds of problems that they saw, but what they had was very appreciated. Milt had one patient who came back the next day to thank him for the arthritis medicine he gave her--she said it was the first night in years that her knees hadn't hurt.
In the meantime, Linda stayed at the clinic and "held down the fort". Even in our neighborhood there are very desperate people. One came in with anxiety attacks caused by stress--their monthly maintenance fee (which includes gas, hot and cold water, and radiator heat in the winter) on a 2-room apartment is 1,500,000 lei ($45), she and her husband each earn about 1,500,000 lei per month (his from a disability pension). Her 24 year old daughter has never been able to find a job so far. So they live on $90 for 3 people and have not been able to both pay their maintenance fee and eat, and now they are 15 million lei ($450) behind on their maintenance fees. Their electricity has already been cut off. Now the building administrator has taken them to court and they may lose their apartment. What a life. But this is so common here.
Milt also saw Ionut again--the little boy with leukemia. He is finally back home and doing well again. He was hospitalized with mumps and while in the hospital he caught chicken pox! The pity of it is that immunizations for both of these illnesses are available right here in Romania. But they are not paid for by the government and are not part of the routine immunization schedule.
Last month we didn't have time to mention that we found a new kitty to keep Sunflower company when we're gone all the time. Her name is Mitsy. She is a character! Sunny initially was afraid of Mitsy, jumping back and running away when Mitsy approached. Then Sunny went into a depression and just laid on the sofa for 3 days, hardly eating. Now they roughhouse like normal children.
We are planning to come back to Minnesota for a visit and a medical conference in October (10/6-10/27). We really need an American doctor or two to come over and help in the clinic while we're gone. Please pray and spread the word to any Christian doctors that you might think of!
We wish to thank you again for your prayers and your support! We couldn't do this work without you standing by us!