Good evening everyone. We are approaching our last full day here in Guatemala with mixed emotions. We are all eager to see our loved ones, but we feel there is still so much we would like to do and see here. We want to come back home, but we hate the idea of leaving. Oh well.

We had an interesting day today. We had the opportunity to tour the two large public hospitals in Guatemala City today: Roosevelt Hospital and San Juan de Dios. Both of these hospitals serve the general public, which means that they both serve the people who cannot afford to pay for private hospital care. We met some fascinating people who are very much overworked and underpaid. We toured the neonatal intensive care units in each hospital, the intermediate care unit at Roosevelt, and the pediatric intensive care unit and the pediatric emergency room at San Juan de Dios. It was an eye opening experience for all of us. What they are able to do with limited resources and staff is amazing, and yet we can only imagine what it would be like if these two hospitals did not exist here. Rooms filled with babies on ventilators, and row after row of warmers and babies. Roosevelt only delivers high risk pregnancies, and San Juan de Dios has about 300 births a day. Once again I have to say check back after we return, so you can see the pictures from the hospitals.

Roosevelt Hospital has one, yes one, latation consultant for the entire hospital. She is a truly inspirational woman. Breastfeeding is not a popular thing in the city, most women in the city use formula. She is fighting an uphill battle to try to get more women to breastfeed, and to try to get support from the nursing staff to try to encourage their patients to try breastfeeding. We were lucky enough to eat dinner with her, and she stayed and talked with us about her experiences and the difficuties of her job.

Nancy and Karen are already planting seeds for next years´trip, talking to the neonatologist at Roosevelt about what we can do to help him in his hospital. I hope that next years group has as much fun and gets as much out of their experience as we have over the past three weeks.

This evening we were also lucky enough to learn from Karen´s extensive knowledge of the natural sciences. We read about the difficulties the rains in Wisconsin have caused, including the tragedies faced by Lake Delton. We have had rain and clouds for the past week and a half or so, remnants from a variety of hurricanes and tropical depressions, and Erin asked where all the rain in Wisconsin was coming from. Karen, with a perfectly straight face told us ¨clouds.¨Where would we be without her keen insight.

Tomorrow we are off to the Guatemala City dump and Safe Passage. You can see and read more about this program at http://www.safepassage.org/. After that, a free afternoon. Some are wanting to go to the city zoo. After spending three weeks with this wild bunch of women, I think the zoo might be a little tame for me.

I finish this post with a personal note. We have celebrated a couple of wedding anniversaries on this trip, and we celebrated one more today. I want to wish a very special happy anniversary to my wife, the true love of my life. Thank you, Mary, for 18 of the most wonderful years of my life, and thank you for letting me trot off to Guatemala. Without you, I would not be even half the person I am today. All my loves, my love. Nathan