The Brandt Blog

Enjoying our first morning coffee in Firenze

I am in charge of documenting our house progress for the next few days.  I’m not as witty as Jeff but I’m a great picture taker.  The guys were busy drywalling the first floor.  There was stuff everywhere and I didn’t want to get in their way so I only took a picture of my […]

Since the girls will be in two different states on the first day of school, we took the annual picture on the bench early. The volunteers at UK were awesome! We pulled up and they unloaded the car for us. Here they are unloading the rooftop carrier. Great investment! Next they loaded everything from the […]

Jeff and I met with Rick today to discuss our fireplace options. As soon as I pulled up to the house I couldn’t believe how many guys were there working. The plumbers, masons, roofers and carpenters were all hard at work. Below are a few pictures capturing their hard work.           […]

Our adventure has come to an end. After breakfast we had a group reflection. Each one of us went around the circle and shared a rose, thorn and bud ( favorite, most difficult and something you’d take away) from our trip. I’m not exaggerating when I say there wasn’t a dry eye among us. We […]

Today was super busy. Maddie and I worked in the pharmacy together. It was super fun working side by side. The community that we served was called Victoria. They weren’t as poor as the other communities relatively speaking.

What an awesome day! Neither of us had ever zip lined before so since this whole experience is about going outside our box I signed us both up. There were 25 of us in our group. We did 13 different lines. I will be honest and admit I was quite scared before the first run. […]

    Here is a picture of Anne and Mads about to start working for the day at the clinic outside of Quito.

Like I said before the area is very poor. The community has its own well and is in the process of digging and putting pipes into the ground so all homes can have running water. Since we worked at the fluoride and triage stations they were done before the others. We were given a walking […]

Today Maddie and Zarrin were in charge of fluoride and hand washing. They brushed the children’s teeth with fluoride and gave a hand washing lesson as well as playing with them. I worked in triage taking blood pressure, temperature, height and weight.