I've transplanted once again, this time to share a house with three of the other medical students on this same rotation. They're an adorable, easygoing group, between 23 and 25 years old and attached at the hip. These three (Monica, Maria, and Maria Jose) are in their very last month of clinical rotations of medical school, unlike the rest of the students on this rotation who have about two years left. Their schedule is a bit off-kilter because they're also doing an MBA, so they've had to cut some months off here and their to get that done. I don't fully understand how the clinical years of medical school work here, but somehow they've done pretty much everything together. (Of course what I do know is that they all started university aka medical school at around 18 and are about to finish; how efficient.)
We're staying in a very nice condo that belongs to a friend of Monica's dad, in a town about 10 minutes' drive from Antigua. It has two bedrooms but they (reasonably) feel weird about the master bedroom so together we are all sleeping in the other room's twin bunk beds. It's like camp, only more relaxed.
Clinic has been better, too. Somehow I managed to finagle my way into only sharing the room with Monica, and so three of the others are tripled up. We each do about half of the talking and examining, although she presents to the supervising doctor almost all of the time. That's okay; I don't need to be skilled at presenting medical cases in Spanish. I just want to be able to do the patient-facing stuff.
Monica is one of those innately and easily generous people. She was the one who first invited me to stay with them (the others readily agreed), she brought double the food from home to share with me (they all go home to their families in the city every weekend), and she's invited me to come stay with her family this weekend. It's incredibly nice, but of course I also want to contribute so I finagled my way into making key lime pie and challah yesterday.
Things have settled into a nice rhythm and I could see myself staying the whole month here but -- the Trio has an MBA class all next week so won't be here. So I'm still going to go to the rural clinic, probably for both of the last two weeks. But if I'm having a terrible time maybe I'll try to come back to Antigua for the last week. But we'll have to see how it goes.
They took me on a couple of field trips-- here we are at a macadamia farm, learning about how long the trees take to mature (a long time) and how difficult it is to harvest the nuts and prepare them for eating (difficult).
Another day, we went to visit the nursing home that is run by the same Catholic order that supports the clinic in Antigua. It is home to hundred and hundreds of severely disabled adults and children. We just showed up but a lady was nice enough to give us a brief tour and we met some of the kids. Thank goodness this place exists; there's a need for a lot, lot more.
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