Wednesday, June 22, 2011

An Ordinary Sort of Day

Good news! Since the Children’s Hospital of Costa Rica that we are visiting this Friday won’t be ready for us in the morning, we can sleep in and arrive at the school around noon. Also, Dr. Malkin gave an interesting TEDx talk titled Donations Hurt, in which he discusses how he came to co-found Engineering World Health as well as the rationale behind the way the organization operates.

As Tom and I walked into the cellphone store after school to buy a charger for use in tomorrow’s lab, the guard inside, wearing a uniform with a black bulletproof vest, was servicing and loading a sleek silver shotgun. His presence made us feel quite adequately protected, but also somewhat nervous as we tried to not look suspicious. Luckily for Tom and me, we were even more pressured by the fact that no one in the store knew any English at all, except for the word “cash” as we prepared to buy (credit card was also an option). Nonetheless, we managed to get by with what we knew, and left with a $6 charger which we will convert into a variable-voltage switching power supply tomorrow.

The same one who was almost run-over by a train the other day (Gavin) had more bad luck with transportation this afternoon. While he was riding the bus during rush-hour traffic, his bus driver decided to veer into the oncoming traffic of the four-lane Trans-American highway in order to pass all the cars held up by the traffic. The oncoming cars responded by moving out of the way and not having head-on collisions. When I was in the same bus before with the same bus driver, he held down the (loud) bus-horn for nearly a full minute, which obviously had no effect on the jammed cars other than to annoy everyone.

No comments:

Post a Comment