OCR Text |
Show -2- Meantime, construction work went on; there was all that last-minute stuff-screens, painting, hardware screwed into place-and the solemn dedication of the building was scheduled for the 25th of April. Hardly had we tossed Lucille and Rex out into the cold world when Nancy Yanito came, asking for the same bed. Things looked not so easy for her but there was no time to bring in a doctor, so the customary relatives and neighbors came and did everything in traditional Navaho way, complete with the woven "squaw-belt" and all. So Charles was born, as the painters painted around and under and over the mother and baby! Ten days before the scheduled dedication, another pickup rolled to a stop before the Mission House. Driver said "My mudder priddy sick" - so we asked what seemed to be the trouble, and it seems he didn't know. So we asked the mother, who said, plantively "it's the baby." But there seemed to be no baby, and we asked, stupidly, if the baby were really sick, and if so - but she interrupted "Now, right now I'm going to have one!" Catherine with visions of the many things that needed doing before the dedication said "You'll have to tell her to go to a dQctor, we cannot take anybody in now" - but by the time we had translated this message it became all too evident that "Now, right now" meant exactly now and not pretty soon. So the pickup dashed the few hundred feet to the incompleted clinic, the mother stepped out of the pickup and into the building, headed for the "maternity ward" but collapsed in the hall-way - Catherine as quick as a flash yanked a mattress from a stretcher and slipped it under Mamma. Not exactly "curb service" but about as close as we want to get to it. So came our first three, before we could "ogen for business." And, try as we would to refuse patients, we just about had to take them in while the workmen were finishing up. |