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Day 2: Network Topology and Coffee Farm
by Saint on Monday May 08, 2000 @ 08:51 PM
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| I met with Joe Wiatt today, a board member of Faith in Practice which is the Houston-based group we are doing missionary medicine with. He is here this month making sense out of chaos. As I mentioned before, the network wire is going to be a tough run through the hospital which is an aggregate of buildings built over 320 years. We decided to punt the job of running the network cabling to a local engineer who has more time, tools and expertise with Hermano Pedro to do it. It looks like we are going to setup the server and a client in the administrative offices, 1 client in central supply, and two in the surgery suite. We brought a cheapo Link-Sys router along which I tested in Houston, but unless we want to run two cables to the administrative area we are going to try to buy another router here locally so that we can have a single four wire cable running to the administrative area.
Not all is sweat and grunt work today. We toured a beautiful little coffee plantation run by Dr. Alfred G. Thompson who has a colorful past as a school principle, University professor and now empressario of the Los Nietos coffee farm in a little hamlet outside of Antigua. A former garbage dump, Thompson bought it in the last years of the Guatemalan Civil War in 1991. He has built a beautiful refuge full of flowers and coffee plants. I'm not much of a coffee drinker, but the smooth flavor of his pure beans was something even I could appreciate. The place was full of hospitality and good taste. Highly recommended. Tomorrow, I may play a little hooky from Spanish language school to semi-direct or confuse the engineer about the network wire runs. Until then, hasta luego. |
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Re: Day 2: Network Topology and Coffee Farm
by Captain Fantastic on Monday May 08, 2000 @ 11:49 PM
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Hey Hey, Ignacio.. glad you made it OK to Guatemala. Sounds like you have things in hand and are making progress. Read your postings with interest - makes me want to grab my old EMS 'jump bag' and do some in-the-field basic medical care. What is the situation with basic medical services where you are at presently? I remember the statistic that 90 percent of patients benefit significantly from basic medical care, as opposed to the belief that more advanced care is needed by the population to benefit significantly as a whole. Is that true of the population where you are at?
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Re: Day 2: Network Topology and Coffee Farm
by Saint on Thursday May 11, 2000 @ 01:05 PM
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I am writing this from an Internet Cafe here in Antigua. The keyboard is much different in the U.S. To answer your question, I will know more next week, but judging from what I have seen in the hospital so far, there are many who have no care at all. Yesterday 300 people showed up in a village to receive care, with capacity only to treat 100. There is much poverty here so there are many without health care. The rich (or more rich, it is relative) do have care, but lab samples get run to the lab by family members, etc. I know this first hand because we are staying with a family that lives behind a beauty shop that they run, and their father had something wrong (unclear whether it is heart, or infection, probably heart) and I did a quickie assessment. These are my first impressions, I ll tell you more next week.
IV
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