After a well deserved meal, we headed back to move to the beach. Most of us were looking forward to the beach, it meant not being so hot and sweaty, and of course swimming. We had things that we had to get done while on the beach, but they seemed like more fun, catching fish with either fishing line or a spear, making a sand shelter, and things like that. Our first day on the beach most of us swam the whole day away, and ended up paying for that with pretty bad sunburns, I was no exception, I had bad burns too, I wasn’t too thrilled about the situation, but I knew full well that it was totally my fault. The next few days and nights were uncomfortable, but I survived.
The first day I was the first one to get a fish on a spear and one of the first ones to bring one in on fishing line to, thanks dad for teaching me to fish. It was a good thing someone got a fish early because we needed fish bait.
Our last night of coastline survival a huge storm blew in, it brought with it heavy winds and huge waves. None of us were too thrilled about it, our next course would take us right out in the middle of the waves. We spent most of Sabbath and Sabbath night trying to keep tents up. I quickly remembered what I had been taught about quartering your tent into the wind, in other words pointing the least sloped side into the wind. Most of the tents did really well, a few we had to move around to keep up, my bug hut did amazingly well, I was quite surprised that it performed as well as it did.
After we finished our ocean survival time we headed back to our “home base” in little corn, a quaint little place called “Carlito’s”. I would highly recommend it if you are planning a trip to the little corn island area. $20 a night and food is around $5 a meal. Getting there is probably the expensive part. The next 7 days kind of run together, it was our spring break week. It was a very unstructured week, one of the most frustrating and nice things at the same time. We were responsible for ourselves; we were actually aloud to be adults, a concept…...but a good thing.
I had a total of 4 dives throughout the week of spring break. My first dive was a night dive on a rock called turtle rock and true to the name, we saw a pair of turtles, I have never been that close to a turtle before, it was really amazing. I have to say I think the highlights to the spring break was the diving, all but one was really cool, the one that wasn’t really cool was just some random fish, nothing too big or exciting, I did get to work on my buoyancy control, which was very needed. Now I must say that I think I'm pretty decent at it now.
The trip back from Corn was, like it always is, eventful. I don't think we have ever taken a big trip where everything worked out the way it should have. This time some of our baggage never left Corn, they took our carry on baggage away, and they had 3 of our group switch flights, so their luggage didn't arrive on time either. I'd say it’s the curse of flying with a big group and tons of luggage, but I learned later on that it really isn't that.
I think the highlight of going to Port is going to pizza at the oasis. It never ceases to amaze me how much I love the pizza there. I think its just because its very special and we don't get it very often. We were all bummed that we couldn't have it before, so it was much better, a nice artery clogging meal, its soooooo oily, its terrible.
The next day we finally left Port to head to Francia much later than we wanted to, but WE DIDN'T HAVE ANY PROBLEMS!!!! I think it took us about 5.5 hours which is a good time. Everything of course takes longer here, its just what it does. We got "home" at 12:15, a much better time than our last trip here, but still late. We were supposed to have class the next morning, but Jeff said get your stuff cleaned out and put away, so that’s what we did, I think most of us caught up on sleep too.
The short week was very short, we got back on Wednesday morning and SAU came in on Saturday morning, it was amazing having them here. I don't know how they got the gods to smile on them, but they made all their connecting flights and were able to get all their luggage on the same flights, I wish the gods would smile on our group sometime and allow all of our group and luggage to arrive on time together for once…….oh well, I guess we'll see about our trip out of here. Its not that I was getting tired of our group totally, but kind of yes, they brought a whole new dimension to the group here. I made some good friends of their group too. We took a group of them out to the Rio WaWa on Sabbath afternoon, it was quite fun, I didn't swim, but I did have fun showing people how to "shoot" rapids that had never done it before. You could tell a major difference between the IRR majors of UC and the nursing majors of SAU, it was kind of funny to be honest, but they had fun and we had fun, so it was good.
SAU was here for a week and did clinics everyday, so we couldn't do any of ours. That just meant that we had class all week. I wasn't to thrilled, but what it meant was that we are nearly done with one of our classes, this coming Friday we will be done with public health and the week after or so we will be done with travel and tropical health, you don't know how happy that makes all of us here feel. I don't know what we will do with the extra time when we don't have anything to do, but I'm sure we'll find something productive to do with our time. The other nice thing about having SAU here is the fact that we got to send letters back with them to friends. That is the nice thing about having any group come down here, its just a general courtesy that you take letters back and bring them down if you have collected any for the group down here.
I will put a warning at the beginning of this paragraph, if you have a weak stomach, please skip this paragraph. Yesterday was Sabbath and my body wasn't to thrilled with me. I apparently found some sort of GI bug and was throwing up and having diarrhea most of the day until my GI track was all cleared out. Now its been over 24 hours since anything has been in my gut, about 15 minutes ago I had my first Ritz cracker since my episodes yesterday and so far it seems ok. We'll see how it continues for the rest of the day.
Everyone this week is living for Thursday. Thursday four people from UC come to do OBGYN clinics. They'll be here for a while, but they are bringing stuff down for all of us. I'm hoping that 3rd time's the charm for getting my glasses out of not only the Nebraska, but the US as well. They will hopefully be bringing my glasses down, I've gone in my contacts for nearly 2 months straight, not what I like to do, but hey, I do what I need to do.
Today we were supposedly going to hike into Kapri, but we were able to drive the whole way, I was pretty excited about it, however I was kind of looking forward to a hike, but we wouldn't have had all the time to see patients. As it was we didn't get to see everyone that was there to be seen, we will be going back there our last week we are in country, either Tuesday or Thursday.
Friday and Sunday the group from UC did woman's clinics in the MENSA clinic, they had quite the turn out from what I hear, I of course wasn't there, but that’s what they tell me. Guys don't really get to help at all, I know a few of our girls have gotten to go in and assist with the operations, but other than that, I've gotten to set up their room a few times, but that’s the extent of my helping with the OBGYN clinics.
Monday and Tuesday were both clinic days for us. We restarted the rotation with heading back to Santa Claira. That was our first clinic we did down here and the first time we were there, we got swamped with patients, but this time we really didn't see that many people. That has kind of been a trend, I'm glad that is the case, some people are mad, but the less people we see means the less that are sick hopefully. In Santa Claira I worked with Jeff, I always like working with him, he's a teacher at heart and really reminds me of my dad, they have some similar mannerisms. The second clinic was back to Espiransa, that clinic is always fun, we have a clinic that has broken boards in the floor that are big enough to fall in and the Rio WaWa right next-door. At the end of the clinic day we always go swimming in the river, no everyone goes, but after a hot day in the clinic, its pretty much amazing.
We were supposed to have clinic on Wednesday too, but it ended up that we couldn't, so it was going to be a catch up day. I was doing a bit of relaxing when Jeff asked me if I wanted to go into Waspam and help with getting groceries. It sounded like an adventure, so I said yes. We got down to our clinic to pick up the doctor and realized they had someone with a hot appendix that needed transported to Waspam. It took some time to get him loaded up, but we finally got loaded up and on the road. Waspam is on the Hondurian boarder, and right on the Rio CoCo. It took us nearly 2.5 hours to get there. When we got there we dropped the guy off at the hospital and went to go get groceries. We picked up everything we needed and still had some time, so we went and searched out the internet café. After not having internet for nearly 3 weeks, its nice to catch up on everything. Email's from family and friends, comments on fb, emails to write, when you only get internet very infrequently, you learn not to take a ton of time on the internet, but thank you to all who sent me emails and notes on either email or fb. When we were ready to leave Waspam, we stopped at the hospital to see how the guy we had brought was doing. He had just come out of surgery, he had a ruptured appendix, and if we hadn't brought him, he would have died, it was pretty cool that we were at the right place to take him, and to save his life.
Yesterday was our last regular class period this semester. Not to brag to all of you guys that will continue to have school for the next 1.5 months, but our last final is today and when we get back to Union, we don't have any classes, we are all pretty psyched about it. I'm not totally sure I'm ready for the test, but I'll have to be if I'm going to get a good grade on it, it will be in about 4 hours. So plenty of time to brush up on the information.
Well, its getting to be about time for group worship. I'll give you guys a brief rundown on the next few weeks. On Sunday of next week we head back to Waspam, where I'll post this, to head up the Rio CoCo for the week. We spend Monday through Friday on the river doing clinics up at a village called Krinkrin. Friday we head back to Waspam for the night and head back here to Francia on Sabbath morning. We'll get to Francia sometime mid afternoon on Sabbath. Sunday will be our catch up/dry out day. Monday and Friday, I'm not sure, we don't have classes anymore, so not classes, but we'll find something. Tuesday and Thursday we'll be doing clinics, one at Kapri and maybe one at Wisconsin, Wednesday is project development, so we'll try to get everything we can done on the building before leaving. The Sunday (4 April) after that we are leaving very early from Francia to drive to Port, we'll get on a plane and head to Managua and get on a bus to go up to Leon. We'll spend Monday (5 April) in Leon volcano sledding. Tuesday (6 April) we head back to Managua for the next couple of days of recoup and shopping. On Thursday (8 April) at 7a we are sitting on an airplane heading to Houston, arriving there at 11:18a. At 3:00p we are sitting on another airplane heading to Omaha, arriving at 5:12p. Then I'll be back in Lincoln. I hope this just goes to show how close it really is. I love and miss you all.
