Tuesday, March 2, 2010

3/2/10...because I can't think of a catchy title

So we've been back in Francia for almost a week and its starting to wear a little. The weather was bearable until today when it got back to the normal sweat while doing absolutely nothing temperature. We've been doing classes the last two days since Southern is here and they are using the deuce for clinics. Today was the Travel and Tropical Medicine midterm which means we are half done with that class and will probably finish it before we leave Nicaragua. Public Health is over half done and will probably be finished next Friday which is fine with me.

So far having Southern here hasn't been too bad, since there hasn't been much rain lately we've been relegated to taking bucket showers while Southern is here. I still think I use less water taking a regular shower than with the bucket but that’s ok. Not that I have a problem with the group, but its been good to have some new people around to talk to. A lot of them were really surprised when they heard we were spending a whole 3 months down here.

I helped organize a trivia night on Sunday night which involved spending three hours in a group racking our brains for all the random facts and trivia we could think of. We had 5 rounds of trivia and a single music round at the end. It was such a hit we had it again last night but unfortunately my team got clobbered on the music round and came in fourth.

Some of the people that came down with Southern were mechanics and they've been working on the old Toyota Hilux that’s been sitting around broken for the last 6 months. They finally got it running today but who knows how long it'll stay running this time; they're pretty hard on stuff down here. If you didn't know any better you might think our tool shed was in rural Kentucky by all the broken vehicles and junk lying around. There is another broken deuce that hasn't run in quite a while that apparently keeps the other one running, furthermore the grounds are also graced by a non-functioning 4-wheeler.

On Wednesday, which is generally our project day, we broke into two teams one of which went into the village and located all of the wells and pumps. In addition to their locations, they also took pictures and marked their GPS coordinates. I was in the team that stayed behind and worked on a detailed map of the mission premises. We took GPS coordinates of all the buildings and landmarks as well as the perimeter and created a rough map of the area. The purpose of all of these activities was to learn a little bit about how to conduct assessments of the needs of an area with an eye toward development projects. I think it was a pretty useful exercise although it’s a unfortunate that we won't be able to make a major difference here aside from the medical aspect since we have such a limited amount of time.

So its finally almost the weekend which means two more weeks before we head on our river trip down the Rio Coco. Next week we start doing clinics again since Southern will be gone, this also means we can go back to normal showers which will be awesome.

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