Last week, already??

After an awesome weekend in Boquete, we are back in the clinics, communities, and hospital this week. I can't believe it's our last week! This weekend six of us, plus our trusty guide, set off at midnight Friday night to hike volcano Baru. It took us 10 hours round trip, but totally worth the view at the top! On sunday we went Zip-linning as a group. Definitely the best zip lining I've ever done! After what was supposed to be a "relaxing" weekend ... we hit the clinics again Monday morning :) However, I'm still feeling the aftereffects of hiking all night Friday...

I thought I'd never get past the language barrier while I was here. It has been incredibly frustrating to try to communicate with the doctors, nurses, and patients in the clinic and hospital, but I have learned so much from it. I'm not bilingual by any means ... I'm not even sure if I can say a complete sentence correctly but I have learned how to get my across. One step closer to being more culturally competent in caring for patients of different backgrounds. Hopefully I'll be able to take this home to patients in Florida that only speak Spanish.

Tomorrow in Chami, they are having a health fair for the community. One role of the community nurse is assisted the community to identify health concerns and assist them to take action. The nurses of Chami are really great at doing this. They have been promoting this fair and are going to be taking height, weight, and blood pressure, as well as immunizations, women's health stations and child development stations. These nurses really care about their community and want to help the people of Chami own their health concerns and ways to correct them.

Last week thursday we went to the hospital in David for an evening shift. We were paired off with a UNACHI nursing student and assigned a patient. Thankfully, my nursing student knew a little English! It was very interesting to watch them do their head to toe assessments and documentation. The night shift wrote in red pen and the day shift wrote in black or blue to make it easy to tell what shift things happened during. I also got to find the heart beat of twins :) One of the things that struck me the most though was the nurse to patient ratio. One nurse to 42 patients during the night and during the day shift they have two nurses. How is that possible??