Yesterday was a fabulous day! I went with a group of Canadian nurses (who use our internet cafe religiously) to a little village above Muzafarrabad. They are currently working at two hospitals in Muzafarrabad but decided to add the village to their list becuase many of the village women are unable to get into town where all the hospitals are located. The two other hospitals that they work at are the Abass Hospital and the Neelum View Hospital. At Abass the nurses are doing wound care. They come back to the camp at night with the most gruessome pictures of crushed limbs from the earthquake and amputations. The Neelum View Hospital is sort of a project of theirs. In down town Muzafarrabad a hotel collapsed and killed about 200 hundred people. One of the buidlings survived the earthquake and is in pretty good shape. A relative of the owner donated the building for aid work and the girls are now setting up a clinic there. The floors are beautiful marble and the celings are framed with intricate molding. Its actually amazing how well the building help up. There are only very very small cracks visible where as the large part of the hotel right beside it is completely flat. These nurses (all of them women) are really amazing troopers. Beucase they are not part of the UN they don't get to use the showers or the cafateria. They eat canned food and use baby wipes. I don't think any of them are like-minded and I am hoping to have a good impression on them. They spend a lot of time over here at the internet cafe and we chat a lot. Please P for their endurance and my testimony with them. Ok, so back to the village... I didn't help at all with the medical side but I was able to take loads of pictures. It was a great experience. Before we went to the one village our translator took us to a small tent camp where about 15 families lived. The nurses examined many of the children there. Few are seriously ill but many are slightly malnourished becuase the mother's feed them only bread. The nurses tried to explain to the women that the children need fruit, vegetables, meat, and eggs to have a healthy diet. The people in the villages seemed to be in fairly good spirits and the children run and play just like children all over the world. Things are looking very hopeful here! I put a picture on my MySpace album thing of a boy with polio that the nurses looked at. He was the sweetest kid full of smiles.

Tomorrow we leave for Thanksgiving vacation in Islamabad!!!