While Tom and I were waiting this morning for Jairo to return and give us instructions, a man whom we did not know walked into our shop area. “Hola.¿Como estás?” I said. “I’m good, how are you?” he responded. “I speak English; where are you from?” In the conversation that followed, he told us much about himself and how he had learned English.
“I moved to the United States when I was twelve—illegally. First, I lived in L.A., but they caught me and put me in a shelter. Later, when it was time for me to go to high school, they came to me and said, ‘You have to go to Michigan right now,’ so I was like, ‘alright’, and I went to high school in Detroit.”
I asked about where he’d been in Michigan, and one of the places was Mackinak Island, a unique place I visited as a child on vacation with my family. “Yeah, all bikes and horses there,” he said “it was really cool.” Then he described his high school experience.
“For the first three months of high school, I understood nothing because it was all in English. I sat through all of my classes thinking, ‘What are they doing? What are they talking about?’ My teacher in Michigan didn’t know any Spanish, but whenever she wrote something on the board, I always copied it down. By six months, I could pick up a few words here and there. At nine months, I could speak it.”
“After graduating high school, I went to Grand Rapids Community College for two years, studying computer science. Right after that, one year ago, I got deported. I’ve spent the last year looking for a job. Olanchito sucks, man; there aren’t any jobs. I’m from Ceiba but I moved here for my girl [girlfriend].
“The thing around here is, you’ve got to know somebody to get a job. I can speak good English. I know computers. It doesn’t matter. Man, they don’t do nothin’ for you unless you know somebody. And you have to know them really well. Another thing is politics. A lot of times that determines who they’ll hire. If they’re democratic and you’re not, no job. Sometimes you’ve even got to lie about it to have a chance.”
During his time in the U.S. from ages twelve to twenty, Juan wasn’t able to make the kinds of connections he needed to get a job. Shortly after this part of our conversation, however, his cell phone rang, and he answered it to complete a short conversation. Then turning to us, we had the following unexpected conversation:
Juan: That was my girl on the phone just now.
Me: Oh, how is she?
Juan: She just had a baby.
Me: Oh? So… you’re a father now?
Juan: Yeah.
Me: Uh… Boy or girl?
Juan (smiling): It’s a son.
Me: Well congratulations! What are you going to name him?
Juan: ‘A-veel’
Me and Tom: What?
Juan: E. V. I. L. Evil… I got it from the Bible.
Me and Tom: ….??
Juan: Oh, haha—it’s not like the English word.
He then explained to us that unlike the United States where many people are in the room for birth, in Honduras, no one except the doctors and nurses are allowed in the room during labor and giving birth (in Spanish, the literal meaning of the expression for giving birth is ‘to give light to the child’).
Since he was looking for a job, we asked for Juan’s phone number, and he offered to come be a translator for us if we needed one, which could also give him a good opportunity to meet with potential employers in the hospital and impress them with his English skill. In fact, a translator could be extremely useful towards the end of the month, when Tom and I perform ‘needs finding interviews’, an important information gathering exercise during which we ask a number of doctors, nurses, and staff about what kinds of broad, general needs the hospital has. The information is then used to guide the development of new medical devices tailored specifically for use in the developing world.
While still waiting for Jairo to return from whatever he was doing, I walked less than a block from where I was, still on hospital grounds, to a small Pepsi/Tigo shop. Tigo is a company that sells SIM cards and chips for cell phones, and at any given time, one may expect to see six or seven (or more) Tigo shops in his or her immediate surroundings. Altogether, the chip I bought and however many minutes are on it cost about five dollars.
I returned to the shop to find Jairo and Tom working in despair on the troublesome printer. Having opened up the old, broken printer to use its spare part as a replacement for the bad part in the new printer, they found that the old printer had been put out of service for exactly the same reason! With this setback, the only option seems to be somehow finding replacement parts in La Ceiba to buy for both printers.
After this, Tom and I began taking inventory in the laboratory, which contains instruments like blood analyzers, centrifuges, and microscopes, among others. The staff who were running blood and tissue sample tests showed us each piece of equipment individually so that we could easily compare the machines to the inventory from 2009 and record changes and additions. Fortunately, the laboratory staff responded well to my clumsy Spanish introduction of who we were and what we hoped to accomplish in the hospital, and the staff presented many problems to us right away. We now have no doubt that there will be a great deal of work for us to do once we organize and prioritize the list of out-of-service equipment.
Strangely, I quite enjoy having free access to all the restricted areas of the hospital, especially our next inventory stop, the x-ray rooms. A worker from the x-ray department told us about a problem with one of the machines, and although fixing an x-ray machine would be a great success, I thanked her for bringing the problem to our attention and told her that we may or may not be able to address it.
When taking inventory in the laundry department, we found that the demon-machine that broke a few days before we arrived was also broken when inventory was taken in 2009. A few tests today and more guidance from the manual seems to suggest that the problem could be associated with the ‘safety inverter contactor’ which costs about thirty dollars to replace. This would be a much better situation than the possible problem with the inverter itself, which costs several hundred dollars to replace.
We were invited by some other workers at the hospital to play soccer at 3:30 in the afternoon, but we weren’t able to find the field, didn’t catch our ride when they came to pick us up, or the game didn’t happen. Instead, however, we came across a small urban lot converted into a soccer field, with several children playing barefooted, while the older ones had shoes. Tom and I, confirming that it was a field for anyone to use, walked on and motioned for the others to join us. For the next hour, the five of us kicked the ball around to each other, not needing to use any English or Spanish at all.
On our way back to the house for dinner, we stopped by Ramón’s juice stand to try some new varieties. Just for us, he had prepared a batch of tangeringo juice (completely unrelated to tangerine), which had a citrus/gingery taste that was very refreshing. Since Ramón wasn’t there at the time to see us try it, we asked his wife to let him know we had come.
Dinner was again delicious tonight. And the dish we were served closely resembled a taco salad, except that the nacho chips were replaced with slices of fried plantains! Afterwards, we went out in search of an internet café, and ended up staying at one late enough to need to walk back in the night. Although our information said not go out at night, we had no incidents and did not even see anyone who looked at all suspicious.
After I returned home, the time had come for me to do my first round of Honduran laundering. Although I had been granted permission to use the washing machine, I took off its covering and opened it up only to find that a great quantity of bugs or something had entered and died inside (I mean, a couple kilograms or so of them). This left me no recourse but to wash manually. Although I had never before performed aerobic laundry, using a large tub of water, detergent, a rock, and a washboard, I thoroughly cleaned six pairs of underwear and socks, two shirts, and a pair of pants in a process that required about eighty minutes of character building. Socks, by the way, are the most annoying thing to wash by hand. Hopefully, part of what I washed will be dry by morning.
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