Hace mucho calor en La Ceiba

Alo!

Well I am finally now in Honduras. We had a heck of a time getting here. On Friday night, a bunch of us spent the night in the school because our bus to the airport left at 3:30 am. Needless to say I didn´t go to bed until around 2 or 2;30 and was definately tired the following morning. To our wonderful surprise, they upgraded six of us to business class so we spent our time flying in style, they even served us a lovely breakfast. We had an hour layover in San Salvador, El Salvador and then flew into San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Once there, we met up with our on sight director, Jody, who gave us the news that our bus wasn´t leaving for 4 hours (I don´t know why we didn´t catch a later flight then). So we sat around in the airport (I managed to get a couple more hours of sleep). Then we took a really nice bus to La Ceiba, where our homestay met us at a local hotel.

Julien and I are living with the only technician at Hospital Regional Atlantida. His name is Rigoberto. He lives with his wife, Jackie, and two of his three kids, named Rigoberto and France. They have a second hand clothing store in the front of their house with everyone living behind it. Our room is quite nice, we have a king size bed and another queen bed (the bed is absolutely massive and I get lost at night in it). Plus, our room also has our own pèrsoanl air conditioning unit which they said we could use at no additional cost as well as interent (unfortunately no wifi so I have to use their computer). I am very pleased with the place thus far. Definately better than what I was picturing.

Needless to say, we spent the first night sleeping. Once we woke up at noon, we had some lunch and just spent the afternoon hanging out. Then, Jackie invited us to go swimming in river. So we got our swimming suits on and headed out. We were able to see more of the residential area of the city and met more of her family. We ended up swimming in the Caribbean instead because the river "smelled funny." It was a lot of fun to spend the day with them and just relax.

Today was our first day of work. I had no idea what to expect, what should I wear, was I prepared enough, etc. We woke up at 6 am (always early), had breakfast at 6:30, then off to work with Rigo at 7. It takes around 15 minutes to get there by car (but we had to take a taxi back because Rigo switches his car in the middle of the day with his son who has a moped so he can go to the university). Today´s work was mostly inventory. Rigo showed us a department and we introduced ourselves to the staff and began taking inventory. The Hospital isn´t as big as what I thought, around 150 beds. So far we have done Children´s observation and Pediatrics and we´ve inventoried around 50 machines. At 11, he told us we could go to lunch and come back at 1 (we were shocked to be given 2 hours but when we asked if he wanted us back earlier, he told us at 1). So Julien and I went to Pizza Hut (we wanted to check it out since we heard they had free wifi). The place was really nice, just like in America. It was air conditioned, had wifi, and the prices weren´t bad (I only spent 6 dollars on the entire meal, not bad for an american restaurant here). We came back at 1 and started repairing some nebulizers. Unforutnatley, we were never trained on such devices so we were learning as we were going along, eventually Rigo had to show us a thing or two on what he actually wanted (mind you this is all in spanish so realize how hard it is to talk technical in spanish and understand what´s really going on). At 3 pm, it was time to go home. It wasn´t a bad first day, but I can definately tell there is going to be a lot to learn still. I hope by the time this is over, we can leave the hospital better than when we first got here. Wish me luck!