Heres a picture of a billboard we drive by on the way to the hospital. It reads, "Mr. Roberto Michelletti, Constitutional President, the people thank you and are grateful for you defending our constitution and democracy"... thats not propaganda...
The other day, our hospital had a meeting to decide if the workers were going to go on strike on Thursday and Friday in support of Zelaya... thankfully they decided not to. There are however, a handful of hospitals in the east part of the country that are on strike, two of which EWH has students at...
We did also hear today that the buses are all on strike, so we're not sure if our trip planned for this weekend, to the Copan Mayan Ruins, will go on or not...
Last but not least, in the last half an hour I have heard from a couple different people(but far from confirmed) that Zelaya and Michelletti have both accepted a proposal that would allow Zelaya to return, but with less power. I've been trying to find it online somewhere, but either its not true or it hasnt been confirmed yet, so we'll see on that one too.
In other news...
We've been working hard on a big GE ultrasound machine that was donated to the hospital, and at the same time working on a handful of other things, from infusion pumps to vitals monitors.
Here are some pictures of us at work and of our hospital, etc.:
Here's Fernando working to take out all of the circuit boards so we can clean each one individually.... we took out a lot of screws...
The stacks of circuit boards and the cleaner we used to spray each one. The machine is now working, we just need the manual to know how we can reinstall the software and such...
Fernando was helping out a lot while I was putting the circuit boards back into the machine... He had a picture of me doing likewise while he was working... but it somehow got deleted...
This is a picture of our desk back in our work room... we like to keep it neat.
This is a picture of the desks of two of the other guys that work in our room with us... they dont exactly do a lot. And by that, I mean they do nothing except read the newspaper, eat, twiddle their thumbs, and get paid really well...
Since it would be a little awkward to take a picture of them, we took the next best alternative - imitate them and take a picture of it...
As for the weekend... we decided to stay in SPS. It was a great decision. Friday night, our house brothers and a few of their friends, plus us went out to dinner at TGI Fridays. Not only was the dodger game on, but I got to have their "Jack Daniels glazed" baby back ribs... the perfect reminder of TN, yeah? After dinner, instead of them throwing a party for us (dang curfew...) we went back to the house and played a game of poker. I got to learn all the words for things in Spanish... and I won the pot of 160 Lempiras! Yeah... that amounts to $8, enough for me to buy everyone beers the next night at the bar.
Playing poker on a ping pong table on the back patio... my poker skills from high school can transcend the language barrier...
On Saturday, we drove out to the beaches of Cortes and Omoa... this is a picture of the beach at Omoa. Its really not much of a beach - theres no sand. We didnt go swimming, but we did have a 2 and a half hour lunch at one of these open air restaurants...
Back to work...
The beginning of this week has been nothing short of amazing. Monday we got to see our a woman get her tubes tied and also... our first C-Section. Absolutely amazing. We were standing at the woman's feet watching the whole thing. Its one of those things that you cant put into words. Watching a surgery makes me want to be a surgeon... we'll see about that one though...
After spending yesterday pretty much getting the ultrasound to work, we started to help Denis and Eduardo clean up some air conditioning units in the maternity ward today. As we were starting, one of the nurses came up to me - knowing I was a twin - and told Fernando and I we should come with her... a woman was having twins in a c-section. It was again, amazing to see. Here's a picture of the twins:
This is literally less than two minutes after birth... the mom hadnt even gotten to see them yet at this point.
After we finished seeing the twins born, we went into the room where we would be cleaning the air conditioning unit. We saw our first two natural births... wow. I've got a few pictures of those... but I'll be nice and I wont put them up - theyre a little graphic.
After working on the air conditioning for a while, we took a trip back to the bodega (the storage closet where they put all of their unused or broken equipment). There are at least ten rooms - big rooms too - full of anesthesia machines, infant warmers, surgical lamps, gloves, catheters... you name it, theyve got it. I took a video of a walk through... it took over 5 minutes. I've been trying to upload it here, but its not loading properly. For now, here are a few pictures:
This used to be an operating room... theres at least 5 surgical lamps and a bunch of other random stuff just piled in here...
These bags are filled with catheters and other things that sat in a warehouse for two years in the middle of their transport over here for donation. All of it is expired, but they cant throw anything away until the government signs off that they can...
Tomorrow we're going to head to a different hospital with Denis to grab some parts for an x-ray machine that he needs and then we'll be working on the ultrasound and who knows what else... I'll be sure to take some more pictures and upload them when I get a chance!
If all goes well, I'll be posting pictures of Mayan ruins in my next post... so keep your fingers crossed that this government agreement stuff is actually real...
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