In the morning, we scrubbed in to inspect the maternity ward and the surgery area, both of which were very interesting. Also, the staff gave us useful information about conditions in the hospital they hoped to see improved if more resources become available. Each person, working a different job, has different views of what the hospital’s priorities should be, but certainly most of them support our work in looking for long term means of improvement.
At work today, I spent considerable time over lunch trying to explain in Spanish the meaning of “It doesn’t count if you don’t get caught,” to a vender. The best I was able to do was, “Something bad that you do doesn’t mean anything if people don’t know you did it.” No matter, though. All anyone actually wanted to know was whether the shirt had some vulgar or self-demeaning phrase that a Spanish-speaking person might unwittingly wear. “Oh, it’s fine,” I said.
The gravity of what we do was reinforced today by a death in the emergency room. Whatever the cause was, there is no doubt that medical equipment is vital in the diagnosis and treatment of medical problems of any level of severity. I heard that another group this summer was able to put a defibrillator ($20,000) back into service for their hospital after the device quit working due to the battery’s failure to charge. Without a doubt, this group’s success is a lifesaver for many people whom that group will never meet.
In the big picture, though, there won’t be volunteer workers with specialized training in salvaging batteries at every hospital whose defibrillator breaks down. This is why our work focuses not only on discrete fixes and staff training, but on research for developing a curriculum for a technical training program involving Honduran students and eventually Honduran teachers.
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