Armenia Medical Mission 2014 – DAY 6 – By Kyle Kevorkian

The Evangelical Church of Armenia in Stepanavan, where we set up our clinic.

Day 6: We woke up in the morning and had our delicious breakfast. We all packed up our bags and brought our luggage downstairs to prepare to leave for Stepanavan. We all put our luggage in the back of a truck and boarded our buses and traveled to the local church (Evangelical Church of Armenia inStepanavan). There, we picked up all the boxed supplies from the clinic, loaded them in the truck, and were on our way to Stepanavan. We traveled for about an hour through the mountains by Vanadzor. Half way through the trip, we entered a long tunnel which emptied us out into a completely different environment: a mountainous forest. Upon arriving at Stepanavan, the first thing that we did was immediately unload the clinic supplies. We quickly set up the clinic and then sat down for a brief but delicious lunch. It was quite an extravagant lunch compared to what we had previously eaten. When lunch finished, there was no time for sitting and relaxing, it was time to get to work. A rowdy crowd had already gathered outside the clinic pushing and shoving to register and enter. We worked half a day and saw about 170 patients during that time. When the final patient was seen and received their medications, we sat down to dinner and afterwards attended the church service there. At the end of the day, we boarded the buses and headed off for our first visit to our new hotel. It was a large complex, with rooms in the hotel and also outdoor apartments. There was one problem though which we all encountered: there was no water! Naturally, this sparked a few complaints, and coupled with the lack of our “guaranteed WiFi.” A few became a bit unruly. We tried to speak to the hotel personnel to fix the issue but they all kept bustling around and running away! Finally, we were able to corral the manager who, in a heated debate, ended up blaming us for turning off our water. It all made sense, of course the first thing one does when they enter a hotel is immediately turn off the entire hotel’s supply of water because who needs water!? Well after a humorous (from our side) conversation, we finally got the water working. At this point, we were all ready to retire for bed. We had a full day ahead of us tomorrow and we all needed to get a good night’s sleep.