Thursday, June 23, 2011

The tunnel at the end of the light

I have noticed that on my walk of about three blocks between my bus stop and the academy in San Pedro, the birds squawking overhead every day are green parrots—lots of them. I figure they’re relatively entertained by the bustling city below.

Our lecture was about electrical safety on the scale of the hospital as a whole. We need to make sure that a dedicated ground exists, created by pouring concrete, wrapping the concrete in copper wire, encapsulating the device with more concrete, and then burying the entire thing at the depth of the water table or deeper. “Ground is ground,” Ric says. Then, we must ensure that all of the power outlets in the hospital are correctly wired to this ground, a time-consuming but important task which has hopefully been accomplished by previous groups of EWH technicians.

Gladys began testing our Spanish skills today by roaming about the lab and probing everyone as if she were a worker at a hospital in Honduras or Nicaragua needing to know what was going on or what to do. The pressure of speaking Spanish to the “Jefe de Jefes”, as some have decided to call her, caused me to mess-up all kinds of simple phrases which I knew quite well, kind of. In just a week, I’ll be in Honduras with far fewer English speakers! This is, of course, when I'll gain the most valuable learning experiences, and though as we come to the final days of training, Costa Rica is easy to live in, I must relish the challenge of facing the unknown that lies ahead.

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