The entire brigade was welcomed to San Juan de los Lagos by the President of the Municipality.  This is the gorgeous view we had from his office.  Each year, many people make a pilgrimage to this area and always visit the Basilica of San Juan de los Lagos, among other holy places nearby.

You can just see by his face how excited he is to go with us to San Juan de los Lagos with his new brigade.  We have worked with him before, but this time he is directing our team in the region from where his father’s family came.  Keep checking back! Laura is taking lots of pictures and will post as often as she can!  Andele!

We always arrive a week or two before a project to have enough time to gather all the supplies from our vendors for the medical kits, meet with our education partners to make sure all is ready, and then assemble all the medical kits.    Here you see the two demonstration kits and a family of 5 CPR dummies our brigade will use to train our newest group of Promotores (Community Health Workers).

This time we are working with a new education partner, UVM (Universidad del Valle de Mexico).  They have a campus in Zapopan, just outside of Guadalajara. This will be their first brigade and they are sending along specialists in many fields, including physical therapist, internal medicine, pharmacists, and nutritionists.

This week we are placing our order for the items that will go in our medical kits.  Each kit has lifesaving items like manual respirators, injectables, IV solutions and supplies, rehydration packs, bandages, diabetes testing equipment, blood pressure cuffs, physician’s grade stethoscopes, prenatal vitamins, anti-scorpion and anti-spider venom and hundreds of other items.  Laura will be bringing down a family of CPR dummies for the Promotoras to practice on.

San Juan de los Lagos and the surrounding area is popular with pilgrims (peregrinos) who visit the many holy sites in this area.  Miracles have been attributed to the small image of Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos, which can usually be found in the basilica pictured here.  Tia will be launching a project in June in the many poor villages in the outlying areas of this municipality.