Well, I got to El Salvador on Wednesday! Wow, what a crazy place! Here they have a lot of what we have in America but there's a big gap between the poor and the rich. Here they have McDonalds, Wendys, Pizza Hut, and just about everything else. Here all those place deliver and don't charge anything for it, so that's kinda cool. I don't really plan on eating at those places but it's still cool.
The food here is amazing! Here we eat breakfast and lunch on our own and go to our cook, Estella's house for dinner. So far she's made us chile relleno (a chile filled with cheese and rolled in egg), with rice and beans, tomales con helote (corn), rice, beans and tortillas, eggs and tortillas, and some beef dinner with a cabbage salad and rice, with arroz con leche for dessert (rice with milk). Tonight we went to a Mexican restaurant for dinner and I got carne asada tacos with tons of hot sauce!! Surprisingly the food here isn't hot and very different from Mexican food so I was pretty excited to eat it!
Right now there are 28 volunteers with HELP and they are all a ton of fun and amazing people! All 28 of us are living in a house we rented and it's crazy! I sleep on a cot in a room with 4 other girls. There's 3 rooms upstairs for all us girls and about 3-4 'rooms' downstairs for the guys. That really consists of the living room, some bedrooms, and the entryway/garage thing. We have a tiny fridge we all share in a small kitchen. It's actually pretty nice and spacious. There's a back porch with chairs and tables, and a back yard with fruit trees. I love it! Apparently some people get internet here but I haven't been able to yet. There's three little spots that work and they've figured out secrets to get it like putting it on a stool on top of the table outside, using it while it rains, or in the morning or late at night. They have quite a system going on. Anyway, there's an internet cafe that a lot of people use with Skype so that's probably how I'll communicate. Cell phones are cheap here too so I might get one to talk to people here for the projects we're doing and to call home. Part of me likes not having one though because it's nice not having to worry about it.
Ok, about the projects finally! So the people that came in the first wave set up a ton of projects and have had a lot of success so far. They just barely got into one of the hospitals called Zacamil the day before I came, so I've been able to start kind of from the beginning with them. So far we've been helping the nurses in the ICU, the MedSurg unit, and the orthopedic unit. They're really understaffed and are busy so it's been nice to help them out. Normally in an ICU there's only 1 patient per nurse but here they have 5 or more! The hospitals here are crazy! They are old and dirty. All the nurses wear white scrubs with little nursing hats. I honestly feel like I stepped back into 1911. I've seen some crazy stuff that makes me wonder about how things work here. Anyway, more later...
There are a few pre=med students with us, a nursing student, and me who just graduated. We're hoping to get into the mother baby unit next week to help with the babies and start a project to improve the patient education for the new moms. All of the projects with HELP need to be self sustaining so we are looking for the best option to really make a difference and allow them to keep it going when we leave. For now just being there and doing a needs assessment is the best we can do.
Another project is teaching English 3 times a week for an hour each lesson. I've been helping out with the beginner class and it is a TON of fun! There are about 30 students who are eager to learn and love being there.
We've been working on a mural at the national children's hospital that has disney characters on it. It's a lot of fun and the people that come through the hospital always comment on it. Apparently a high school did a different mural there a few years ago and it was pretty bad. It was blue and green with big hot air balloons and ugly! This mural's a huge improvement.
No comments:
Post a Comment