DAY ONE

The second week starts on a Tuesday as we took the Monday off for our weekend travel to Roatan.
Back to work we finally, after a week of being ready, give back the nebulisers that we had fixed on the first day..We have to insist and Melvin finally brings us to all the departments (very slowly). As soon as we give them back we are given new ones with the same problems and we fix those in the afternoon. While fixing them we encounter another Electrosurgery unit abandoned and we ask why. Apparently the footswitch is missing and the scalpels they have have a different connection to that one.

We notice that the footswitch jack is similar to a normal headphones jack so we write that down on our little notebook.

DAY TWO

I bring in the headphones i was given at the airport and we start a little experiment: we wire the connection for the scalpel with alligator clips and we connect the two terminals of the headphones plug to a hand switch that we take from a flash light..the result is shown in the picture…

We run to a guitar shop and we buy an electric guitar footswitch and some banana plug jacks to make an adapter..the surgeon will be happy to now have two working electrosurgical units for laparoscopy.

We are back ready to go to the maternity nurses to have our little lecture. They are very amused by me and Eric. They like to shout at each other but they learn fast, in twenty minutes we are done and the oncubators are ready to be used for newborns. We win some home made tortillas and new friends..

On top of that we are given two more pumps that, after a bit of troubleshooting, are found in need of new switches. We go to the bodega and we get two broken oxigen concentrators from which we get the switches. we now need the drill to finish the job but Melvin feels lazy: he answers yes and disappears.

DAY THREE

Boring day, still no drill from Melvin and the only thing we get to fix is a sphigmomanometre with a little leak, we replace the valve and it’s done.

DAY FOUR

We finally get the drill and we can finish the two switches for the vacuum pumps and we notice that the majority of what needed to be fixed is done.
We see Jorge so we ask him about an Idea we have been having for a while: we noticed that all O2 tanks are unbound, El progreso is a sysmic area and we imagined how terrible it would be to have all the tanks falling at the same time, breaking the pressure regulators or, even worse, shooting like missiles around the hospital. We asked him if we could buy chains and locks to secure all the tens of tanks that are around the hospital. He seemed really positive and he said we would talk about it the following week.

SECOND WEEKEND

This time we went to Copan in the west of the country.

Saturday was horse riding, Mayan ruins, crazy drive in 18 on a pick up truck and hot springs, it could not be better.