This week has been surprisingly slow in the clinic but pretty exciting out of the clinic. On Tuesday I came back to my apartment to find several hundred bees in my bathroom! They lived in the wall and had snuck it through a hole in the wall! Murphy the owner in the building patched up the holes and we thought it was fixed, only to find the next day that several hundred more were in my kitchen! we found there spot and stopped it up only to have the next say several hundred come out in the bedroom! I am not sure if there are still bees but I moved downstairs into an apartment that has far less critters! Also I got my diving certification so I have been enjoying all of Roatans amazing dive sites.
In the clinic we have had far less patients than usual I am not sure if it is because of the two cruise ships this week or maybe the rain? but the hospital has been empty by eleven am everyday! It still boggles my mind how an entire hospital can be empty by noon everyday and all the doctors leave. What happens if someone gets sick in the afternoon? The patients wait for several hours early in the morning only to be told if four hours later that many of the doctors of the left. It seems like such an inefficient system and sometimes it is very frustrating. Especially because I am down here to help out and I have the time to spend more than just a few hours everyday in the clinic. However, this week I have found something to do in the afternoons. Dr Diane, had a group of friends come down for these two weeks who are close friends of Miss Valerie (who owns the HIV clinic in Coxen Hole). Scott Fried is a professional speaker about HIV and safe sex and he and a group of people came down last year and this year to build a house for a family. This year the house is for this man named Alec and his family of four children (he just recently lost a child to a heart complication from Down Syndrome). He is the nicest man and has been the biggest help in building his own house. Every time he speaks he says he is so grateful for the gift we are giving him and he makes all of us cry. The neighborhood he lives in is called La Colonia which is one of the poorest areas on the island where the houses are all perched precariously on hills. The big project for his house is to build a retaining wall to make sure that when bad weather comes the whole thing doesn't topple over. The whole thing has come together extremely fast however we were at a standstill this weekend because la colonia only gets water once every 8 days for two hours and we need water to make cement for the floor. Hopefully we will get it so we can continue the rest of the work this week. Seeing how grateful he is for this house is amazing, especially because his entire family is living in a house much much smaller than the apartment I am staying in by myself. And regardless of everything everyone in the neighborhood is happy. All of the neighbor children come out to help lug buckets of sand and gravel even though they have no shoes and some don't even have complete outfits! This experience of building this house has been amazing especially to see some of the conditions that patients in the clinic come from. I can't believe that this is my last full week in the clinic already, I hope its a little busier than last week.
