St. Martin's Cloak

The Cloak is a collection of audio vignettes—stories that reveal parishioners’ faith journeys. Share your thoughts by sending us an e-mail.

It was sort of a wonderful machine or body that was built out of all of these elements.

Terry Clattenburg

Download.

Terry Clattenburg, one of two translators for the group of 12, draws an analogy between team member Don Mechlin’s creating “exam rooms” out of basic elements and how different aspects of the mission seemed to magically come together.

Don devised a system for setting up examination rooms in the different places and his tools for this were ropes, tarps, shower curtain hooks and a bolt, a clasp, to put into the solid surfaces to hold the ropes. In each place, with Bill Hixon primarily, they set to work at the beginning putting up these ropes while we were unpacking the pharmacy stuff and that sort of thing. They’d tie them to one post or another and work across the room. And we had picked up four posts of wood about 1 ½ by 1 ½ inches in, right near Posada Berlin where we were staying that one night when we first arrived in Guatemala City. Don and I had gone out the next morning and we found a place that sold lumber. So these four posts then were used with the rope and the shower hooks and the tarps to stretch across the rooms and set up different examination rooms. In Chuexa it was four examination rooms; in Chumanzana it was three; Santa Maria de Jesus, I think, was four as well. So that, it was just amazing the way that it just worked with just these basic tools and tying onto different rafters and whatever else to make sure that everything could be taut and held up. And created examination rooms out of an open space.

It just seemed, everything seemed to be such a positive fitting one thing on top of another was manifestation of the Holy Spirit in that sense with the work with the health workers that we had done previously, at least in funding the training, then the different elements such as Don’s engineering skills with simple elements, and then the health workers working with us together in such a complimentary way all seemed to flow .... There were rough spots here and there but overall it was sort of a wonderful machine or body that was built out of all of these elements and worked, I think, to great effectiveness for the people who came through it to be served.