I woke up extremely early this morning, but also very hungry. When breakfast was finally ready, I was pleased to be given two tortillas filled with sausage, egg, and cheese. After breakfast, Tom and I evaluated the amount of paperwork needing to be completed for research, and decided to spend some time at the homestay working on it. After about two of hours data entry and prep for interviews, we got a call from Jairo. “Hey, how’s it going with you guys? The carpenter is here!” he said. I asked to speak with the carpenter, but just as we began talking, the phone call ended—our phone had run out of minutes.
We scrambled out of the room and took the first taxi we saw to the hospital so as to not miss the carpenter. When we met him, he had already been informed about our project to build wall-mounted patient monitor holders, so I only needed to tell him a few specifications. The price for all of this, though, was only fifteen dollars. Before he left, I asked him to talk to the people in the laboratory, who were wanting a locker to secure their personal belongings during work.
We went to the carpenter’s house to get receipts, and then back home to work on more paperwork. At an internet pit stop before returning to the hospital for interviews in the afternoon, I got a letter from Lillian to use as a template for requesting equipment donations from CAMO (Central American Medical Outreach) for our hospital, which serves nearly 100,000 people in and around Olanchito, as well as people in the rest of the provinces of Yoro, Olancho, and Limón.
We returned home to resume paperwork (bringing our laptops along around the city is not recommended) and to tell Maritza that we didn’t need dinner since Julien would be coming. “Perfect, would you like lunch instead, then?” Already sitting at the table were two set places and a large bowl of spaghetti.
At the hospital, I interviewed Jairo, the technician, as part of our research to help EWH develop a curriculum for a biomedical engineering technician training program. The questions help EWH to know how much education and training current technicians have already received, how many hospital technicians are interested in more training, and what kinds of obstacles make attending a training program difficult (e.g. distance to classes, time away from family, etc.). Until the end of the week, I’ll be doing more research like this for EWH as the organization continues to seek out an understanding of the underlying difficulties to improved healthcare and their possible solutions.
Jairo gave us a ride home, but before dropping us off, we rode in the back of his truck to pick up his wife from another part of the city. This trip was scenic and fun, and when we jumped out right by Ramon’s juice stand, we bought some more fresh juice from him. Several cars pulling out of the nearby intersection skidded their tires, after which Ramon said, “One of my glass jugs [of juice] was broken by a little rock that a tire threw. That’s why I keep a clean area in the road.” Sure enough, although dust and pebbles were all around, Ramon had swept clean an area of the road around his stand to protect against tire-thrown debris. Before we left, he gave us some traditional Honduran bread “Caballito”, and fresh green oranges. Both were excellent.
When we returned from the hospital again, I went to work on the Spanish letter, making sure that it applied to Hospital Anibal Murillo Escobar in Olanchito. Later in the evening, Roger, Maritza’s nephew, was visiting, and he helped tremendously by meticulously proofreading the letter and making changes to formalize and professionalize it.
When we finished the letter, we had dinner with Julien, our On-the-Ground-Coordinator for EWH Summer Institute activities in Honduras this year. Tomorrow, he will be visiting the hospital to speak with the director about EWH’s impact on the hospital and what future goals we should work toward.
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