Last Monday (July 25)

Now that we have reached our final Monday working at the hospital in Olanchito, crunch-time is pushing us to accomplish as much as possible before we leave. Our final assignments: pursuing success in our secondary project and finishing our research tasks for curriculum development.

For our secondary project, we hope to construct some wall-mounted furniture for holding patient monitors in the pediatric observation ward. Other possibilities include a locker for the laboratory and a tool board for Jairo, the hospital technician. While inquiring about where to buy wood and how we could access the necessary tools, however, we were advised to have a carpenter do the work instead. At a reasonable price this alternative may be ideal since this further supports the local economy, frees Tom and I to work on other tasks, and ensures—through the carpenter’s experience and expertise—a better final product than we could produce ourselves.

After all the repairs we have made for the small hospital, only a few pieces of equipment remain out of service, so we had little technician-related work to do today. While I roamed the hospital for our research, Tom fabricated a four-way tube connector out of syringes, which we can use to calibrate an inaccurate blood pressure machine. The device clearly needs calibration, having repeatedly measured my blood pressure to be about 96/44, and giving similar readings for Tom. Another component needed for calibration is a sturdy, 500mL container, for which Jairo gave us a piece of an old anesthesia machine. Needing exactly 500mL, we decided to measure the container’s volume the Archimedean way and put water in the bottom to leave exactly 500mL of airspace. To do this, we filled the lid with water to the point that it contributes volume to the container and then poured this water into an empty bottle. Then, we filled the container to the brim with water and used a funnel and a graduated cylinder to measure the contents. First pouring out the lid, we poured out of the main container until exactly 500mL had been poured into the graduated cylinder, meaning that this much air-volume existed in the container. The water that remained will now act as the bottom surface of a rigid container of exactly 500mL, and in case anything evaporates before we can perform the calibration procedure tomorrow, we marked the transparent container at the needed fill-point.

I received an email from Lillian at EWH today with contact information to an aide organization, and I will be using the information to request some equipment that the hospital needs. At dinner time, I was happy to be ravenously hungry, and we were served a delicious meal of rice, salad, chicken, and French fries (with ketchup), all of which was eaten and enjoyed.