3 Weeks Down

Hola!

This has been a great but awesomely busy week.  Yesterday morning we made our third hospital visit, this time to the main children’s hospital of San José. This was easily the nicest of the three we’ve visited thus far in Costa Rica.  The visit was mainly a tour without the hands-on repair work of the first two visits, which they didn’t seem to have much need for anyway.  Almost all the equipment we saw was nearly new and in excellent condition.

Our second hospital visit was last Friday to a hospital in the city of Turrialba.  Like our trip to San Ramon, we took a tour of their facilities and spent some time with some broken equipment.  I spent the majority of the afternoon with an old mercury sphygmomanometer, in which the mercury in the column seemed to jump up and down during every reading.  We found a couple leaks in the device, the second of which was a crack we noticed a little too late to do much with.

To clean the mercury in the device, we tried a tactic from one of our classes, running the mercury over white notebook paper to catch some of the suspended debris.  Of course, mercury sphygmomanometers are nearly non-existent in the US and are being phased out worldwide because of the element’s toxicity.  We played it safe the entire time, without any personal contact.  This was my first time working with mercury, which is some strange stuff, almost otherworldly—a fluid metal that only reminds me of the terminator in Terminator II who can “flow” back to his original form after an injury.

In Spanish class this week all of us gave presentations on a piece of medical equipment completely in Spanish—Powerpoint, speech, and all.  Mine was Wednesday, and I presented on the pulse oximeter, for measuring pulse and oxygen saturation in the bloodstream.  The device uses a combination of red and infrared light to make these calculations, and explaining how one works is a challenge in plain English, all-the-more so in Spanish.  Fortunately, many of the Spanish words for medical equipment and circuitry have similar spellings.  “Oximeter,” for example, is “oxímetro,” and “infrared light” is “luz infrarroja.”

In these courses, we don’t work for any sort of letter grade or college credit, but simply to be effective next month, and the need for what we’re learning feels much more immediate and tangible than most of what I’ve studied elsewhere.  We’re starting to wrap up some of the more technical, electrically-based labs and shifting focus toward mental preparation for next month with labs on working in the developing world, training across cultural barriers, identifying the needs of the hospital, and so on.  Next week we should get more details on how we’ll be getting to our hospitals, where we’ll be staying, conditions there, etc.

I haven’t described much yet about the local cuisine here, which is distinct but also very different from the spicier Mexican foods, which I had originally suspected to be universal throughout Latin America.  Fruits are ubiquitous.  We have not yet had a meal at our homestay that has not included some sort of fruit-juice drink.  Pineapple, mango, and papaya are the more popular ones.  Papaya was new to me, which is somewhat similar to the mango in color and taste, but has a much softer texture.  

For lunch, without any vehicles, we are mostly limited to what is within walking distance of the school.  A small convenience store and restaurant known as “El Tipico,” only a block from the school, has become somewhat of the default lunch spot.  I've eaten here at least twice a week every week thus far.  For 2,000 Costa Rican colones, or about $4.00 US dollars, we get the meal in the picture below, with fried plantains, chicken or fish, a small salad, and red beans with rice. Costa Rica is very well known for its red bean and rice.  This is probably the flagship staple of the country, even more so than fruits.  Some seem to poke fun at the stereotype.

Also, last weekend we had a great trip to the Manuel Antonio National Park, which contains a national park alongside some of the prettiest beaches in the country.  I was a little surprised to find monkeys swinging in the trees next to the shoreline.  Monkeys and beaches have always held very disparate places in my mind, but by the same token, some of the Costa Ricans seem surprised we don’t have them running around the U.S.  One of them is in the picture below, along with a lizard next to one of park trails.

The waves of the beaches caught me a little by surprise.  This particular beach was on the Pacific Coast of the country, and the waves were a lot stronger than most of what I’m accustomed to in the U.S.  The rip currents are also strong enough that the coast guard heavily patrols the area in a boat just off the shore.  It's great for body surfing or surfing, but probably not the ideal family beach.

It hasn't taken long for me to accumulate more pictures than I can share in blog, so to share more I've created a Flikr page, which can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomburkhead/.

I'm looking forward to finishing class this week and sharing more soon.  Thanks for checking in.

hasta luego!