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Day 10: In the Arena
by Saint on Wednesday May 17, @09:28PM
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| It has been two days of ups and downs. Tuesday we went to a very remote village in the Guatemalan jungle in which I saw my first real cases of malnutrition. Guatemala is a place of much poverty, and the village we visted had extreme poverty, people living in tinroof shacks with no plumbing or electricity. We treated approximately 300 people in 6 hours. Afterwards we took pictures, loaded the four wheel drive vehicles and started back in time for a downpour that swelled the rivers. We unloaded everyone from the trucks into a beat-up Toyota bus.
There where no bridges in this remote area, and we had one tense moment in which the bus stalled halfway out of the river. It started up again, fortunately. The next river presented an interesting quandry: We traversed a river on a narrow road, only to have to stop because a bus was coming from the other way. We didn't want to back up because our back wheels where at the rivers edge. To complicate the matter, there was a pickup truck on the same side of the road which made us unable to move forward. Perhaps I should mention that the pickup truck was carrying bee hives with bees. The bus tried to move forward, couldn't because there was a large stone blocking one wheel and bees where flying into their bus and ours! Fortunately, one of the passengers of the other bus figured out why we where yelling and pointing down at their front wheels, jumped out with bees in pursuit, removed the obstruction and everyone moved out quick!
Today was a very long day in which the network decided to loose its marbles. Nothing that previously worked would come online. It took four hours to figure out that one of the plastic connectors had worked loose with pulling and jostling and was creating intermittent failures. I replaced the connector and everything worked. In addition, we are hampered here by a slow modem connection to the Internet and everyone wants to get their e-mail and do other work on the machines I have setup which makes me have to wait to configured the machines until they find a stopping place. In addition, I frequently have to translate Spanish and deal with constant interruptions of the show me how to do this variety. It is a tough environment and I must admit that I almost lost it when I tried to print sticky labels for vitamins in an HP Deskjet printer which jammed by the labels coming off the wax paper, creating a stuck on mess deep in the printer. 20 minutes of picking with tools failed to clear it and I simply gave up.
Time is running short and while I've made progress, I think that many things will be left undone when I leave Sunday. This is a low point. I go out into the villages again to do medicine tomorrow, so I think I'll be more upbeat Friday.
What remains is getting Samba to work with the Windows machines, networking one more machine, getting Freemed working and ensuring that I can get a remote access session going. |
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