Estamos 'en huelga'...

I'll update you on the political situation first again... basically, forget about all the stuff i said last week. It was all rumors. There seems to be some progress between the two sides to get it resolved, and it seems like the new government is at least now open to the idea of letting the ousted president back into the country. There continue to be protests in Tegucigalpa and in our city, San Pedro Sula and they're supposed to get more intense as the week wears on... they have only been violent in Tegucigalpa however.

To continue on that topic, our hospital has been on strike, or 'en huelga' the past two days. They've closed down the outpatient clinic and don't perform any non-emergency surgeries (the baby factory does continue to produce children at a rapid pace, however). The nurses and workers spend all of the morning in meetings where they do who-knows-what. For us, its business as usual. We've been trying to get the ultrasound to work - which, after talking to a GE rep in the US, we've found out the problem is unsolvable without GE's specialized equipment. We've fixed the colposcope (pictures below), a few infant warmers, and have been testing a couple of infusion pumps and an anesthesia machine, among other things. Tomorrow, we're planning on mixing and matching parts from a few infant warmers from the bodega to make a working one and we also want to take a few parts from an anesthesia machine there to fix a broken one in the maternity ward. We'll keep you posted on that though...

As far as last week goes:

















We spent last Monday at the other public hospital in the city, Catarino Rivas. It has about 800 beds - much more than our hospital. It also has an emergency room and ICU, two things our hospital doesn't have. While we were there, we got a tour from a 25 year old Cuban engineer, Rubicel. Cuba is the only country in Central America with a BME program and has about 200 doctors and BMEs in Honduras alone on two year stints.

















Here is X-ray room number six that they have (and the waiting room showed they needed all six of them...). The problem was, as Rubicel told us, that "only one and a half of the machines worked"...

















They had a physical therapy part of the hospital too. Here, we tested the muscle stimulator on Fernando's arm.






















Fernando and I thought these wheelchairs were pretty ingenious... plastic chairs and bike wheels. How much cheaper and more accessible can you get?






















The next day we drove with Denis out to a hospital in a neighboring city, Choloma, to trade an ultrasound machine for an x-ray machine. Yes... i said to trade one for the other... This is a picture of Denis testing the x-ray machine on his hand to make sure it works before the deal goes down.






















Here's Fernando cleaning out one of the infant warmers i was talking about. The problem with most of them is that the lights don't work because the starters are blown. The problem is, they don't sell the starters in Honduras. Because of that, Denis is going to try and make a work-around in the machine so it wont need them anymore.






















The big project for last week was to fix this colposcope, or in other words, an OBGYN microscope. The problem with it was that its power source (the box on the bottom) was broken, and that it was missing its light and the housing for the light.

















Our solution was to take the power and light source from this fiber optic microscope and to hook it up to the colposcope. The power source was a box similar to the one on the colposcope (out of the frame of this picture...)


















This was the fiber optic cable we took off of the microscope.


Here is the hole we needed to fit it into (and have it stay there):







































To get it to stay, we took a cap and filled it with silicone,

















cut a hole in it, and glued the fiber optic cable in the hole.






















We then screwed the cap into its hole, and covered it in black electrical tape to make it look okay. It works perfectly now. We were going to take it back yesterday, but the outpatient clinic where they use it is closed because of the strike.

I also want to tell you a little bit about last weekend too. We had the chance to go to Utila, one of the bay islands off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. We went on a few boat rides, went kayaking, hiking, and the best - scuba diving. It was definitely the best trip yet. The island was beautiful and fun and had tons of stuff going on. Here's a few of the pictures I took... before my camera stopped working (I'll have to steal some pictures from Fernando for future blog posts...)

















The night we got there, we cruised around the bay on the boat of the dive shop we were staying at. That's us sitting on the roof of the boat...






















The sunset on the bay from our rooftop view...






















Later that night, we decided to jump from the second story dock into the water. The photographer's aim was a little off in this picture...


















When we went kayaking, we ended up at an amazing private beach... We got kicked off after a few minutes, but i got some pretty cool pictures first...


















Didi, Julien, myself, and Jodi in between our two dives. It was like swimming in an aquarium...


Anyways, I'll keep you updated on everything new thats going on with another blog post later in the week. Sorry this one is so long and its been a while since my last one...