First Hospital Visit and Soccer!

Saturday, June 9 2012 Friday was a great day! We had our first hospital visit. We split into two groups and half went to Turrialba (my group) and another half to San Ramon, I believe. After an hour and a half of travel through scenic backcountry Costa Rica we arrived in the municipality's largest hospital, which incidentally wasn't that big. We were given a tour and shown the general wards, OR, ER, laboratories, etc. it was so different from hospitals I've visited before in that it seemed just like a sprawling building, not particularly sterile or neat. I'm sure they manage just fine though.  We worked in the large workshop out back. They hauled out a few pieces of old equipment for us to take a look at, not necessarily fix, just examine for practice. They also had three suction pumps (aspirator machines) that each had something wrong with them for us to try to fix. Ron, our instructor, identified the problems with them in very short order, as he has a LOT of experience with the equipment. I'm sure I would have spent 3 times as long determining the function of internal components and even longer examining little details to find the problem(s). Hopefully we'll have many more opportunities to see and work with these machines before we're turned loose so we are as efficient and effective as possible. These Fridays are great practice. Incidentally, we only managed to completely repair one of the suction pumps; time gets to these components and there's only so much we can do. Later we went to the Costa Rica v. El Salvador soccer game! What an amazing experience! The stadium is absolutely enormous. Pablo, the government's engineer sent with us to our hospital, was telling us about how it was built. Apparently Costa Rica was on good terms with Taiwan and China didn't like that. They persuaded Costa Rica to break ties with them, and as a gift they built them a fancy new stadium. Flory told us they shipped over workers, too, and that they worked way more quickly than Costa Rican workers and had it completed very quickly. In any case, the stadium was gorgeous, a bit reminiscent of the "birdnest" stadium built for China's Olympics 4 years ago. I will upload pictures when I get back from this weekend.  More than the stadium it was the people who made it so amazing. Everyone wore a jersey, red or white.  As we approached the stadium we were accosted by countless vendors selling noisemakers, food, t-shirts and souvenirs. I couldn't help being reminded of going to the Quidditch World Cup in Harry Potter. Once we got inside and saw how huge the stadium really was the comparison was intensified - the sheer number of people. It was like being back in Cameron Indoor, but with a whole bunch of people who didn't speak the same language and had a whole set of traditions that I knew nothing about. Talk about contagious excitement! One of the chants they started out early was to the tune of ole, but they substituted in words and we couldn't make them out for the longest time, but I finally realized it was their nickname for their nationality: Ticos. They also had a few more lewd calls for when the ref made a poor call. Also these people are by far the best at doing the wave of any I have ever seen. We did 3 circuits, at least.  It's too bad the game ended in a tie. I'm still glad I went. We got back from the stadium at 12:30 this morning, and we caught our taxi to the bus station to go to Arenal at 5:00. Needless to say we are a bit exhausted, but I at last slept a bit before writing this. We have 2 more hours of travel. It's a coach bus, but I still can't really feel my butt anymore >-<. If the hotel has wifi when I get there I'll be able to post today rather than Monday! I'm excited :)