Im still safe in Honduras, and despite all the news reports, things are completely safe and calm... at least here in San Pedro Sula. They did just put the curfew back into effect, but other than that you would never know there had been any problems.
To start over about Honduras again...
We're staying with the Director of Hospital Leonardo Martinez in San Pedro Sula, the second biggest city in the country and its center of industry. The hospital is one of two public hospitals servicing the city. As for my living situation, the house is full of guys right now - Mrs. Umana is out of town with their daughters til the end of the month... Fernando, my partner for the month, and I share a room. Then there is Dr. Umana, his two sons, Dani (Daniel) and Edgar, and their cousin, Cesar. Dani is in Engineering school studying computer engineering and Edgar and Cesar are both in school studying medicine. Theyre all about our age, so its fun. This weekend, Dr. Umana is going out of town and theyre even going to throw us a 'welcome party' and then take us to the beach one day... sure beats taking the bus.
Back to our hospital - its got about 150 beds, taken up mostly by a big outpatient clinic and a maternity ward. We've spent most of our time so far in the different parts of the maternity ward. The hospital is completely public and the patients pay about fifty cents as a symbolic fee. We go into work every morning with Dr. Umana and meet up with the hospitals technician, Dennis. He's the boss of all of maintenance department, cleaning department, the medical equipment, and a bunch of other stuff. Everybody in the hospital knows him and loves him... its really cool to see. All of the hospital staff is really laid back and fun and seem to really love their jobs. After meeting up with Dennis, we then go around the hospital and fix things for different people, or head to the bodega (equipment storage and graveyard) to grab something to try and fix.
So far, we've fixed a surgical lamp, an ultrasound machine, a neonate pulse oximeter, an infusion pump, and a handful of other things, as well as testing a few machines... I now have a few printouts of my heart's ECG and a video of my heart beating from an ultrasound machine to bring back as keepsakes... At some point later in the month, I'll put up a full list of everything we've worked on so yall can see.
Here's some pictures to give you some sort of representation of what we've been doing and a little bit of what the hospital is like:
Here's Fernando checking out an infant warmer and phototherapy light system in the neonate ward
This is the surgical lamp we were working on in one of the Maternity rooms. Minutes before I took the picture, the floor was covered with blood and placenta... not exactly the most pleasant smell.
The entire maternity ward was donated by Japan. They paid about $18 million dollars for it, including the equipment and training for staff... It also brings us back to the political situation... Japan, like America, has stopped giving aid to the country until the current 'president'is no longer in charge.
The Japanese government even provided the manuals for every machine in the maternity building... all in Spanish. In most cases, one of the biggest problems with donated equipment is they dont give the hospital the manual to go along which makes the machines really hard to repair, or if they do give the manual, its in the wrong language.
Here is one of the many storage closets (bodegas) for donated equipment and broken equipment. Theyre not allowed to throw anything away til the government says its okay... and go figure... they never come to give them the okay so the equipment piles up. Dennis and a few of the other guys showing us around keep saying, "beaurocracy"in spanish. This room isnt even close to scrathing the surface of how much equipment this hospital has...
Here's an aspirator for the storage room we opened up... someone is apparently missing their plastic ware for lunch in the cafeteria...
Heres a view of the mountains from the hospital... what you can see there on the mountain says Coca Cola... according the Dani, its their attempt at a hollywood sign.
The lab girls wanted to teach us how to measure a hematocrit... This is Fernando having his measured.
This is a view of part of the hospital... I'll definitely have more pictures in the future of it.
Dennis was helping us put the electrodes on me so we could test out a donated EKG machine.
To our surprise... it actually worked!
After work today, we got to play soccer on a team with a few guys who were friends with dennis, all around our age. I'm proud to say I scored in my first Honduran futbol game, although we lost 7-5 after leading 4-0...
For now, I need to go to bed... we've been getting up at 6 every morning to go running in our neighborhood...
But I'll be posting more pictures soon, so be sure to come back and check!
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