From Friday night, we all spent the night at the ALE Language school. Our flight was scheduled for 5:35 am so to be sure that we would all make the flight on-time, we would leave the school at 3:30 am and which would mean we should all be in one place beforehand. Usually on Fridays we would visit the hospitals in San Jose but since we did our last hospital visit last week, it was really a free day to do all the things we wanted to do before we left. For the students travelling to Honduras, we had to be at the school at 9:00am for a quick de-briefing. The summer institute is generating curriculum for the BMET program where they train students and engineers from Honduras in Biomedical Engineering. Do devise such curriculum; they need to know what types of medical devices are most popular in their countries. We come in by performing inventory and needs assessment forms while we are working in the hospital. This is sort of a new inventory procedure they have us doing but we needed an explanation as to how to go about performing these need assessments in the hospital. We all had a chance to go over our hospital reports and those left from students from previous years. Afterwards, since we had the entire rest of the day to ourselves before we had our last dinner with our host families, I went to Bagelmens for lunch and free wifi J. It was a chance for we to talk with my dad and Robin before I left for Honduras.
We all had dinner with our homestays for the girls who stayed in the house with me, it was bittersweet saying goodbye to Zeidy, an amazing homestay mom! We all made her a card (with awesome illustration by Anjuli) and signed it EN ESPANOL of course, a few tears were shed and we were off. Mindy, Caitlin and I took a cab because Mindy and my suitcase were too heavy to drag around using the bus to get back to school. We were one of the first ones there so we were the party starters! Once everyone got there, we all played Taboo until we were bored with it. Deasha, Maciej, Liz, Mindy, Jimmy and I went into an empty classroom and watched Insidious until most of us fell asleep.
I woke up at 3:00 am to a horrible chill and nauseous feeling. Come to find out I would be sick the entire travel to Honduras. I am very Thankful for my prayer with Cliff before I boarded the plane. Have to realize sometimes the devil works to keep me away from doing GOD’s work, in this case volunteering at the hospital. Luckily my ticket had me flying business class the entire way to San Pedro Sul ; from San Jose to El Salvador to San Pedro Sul. Because they ran out of seats in business class on the flight to San Pedro Sul from El Salvador, some of us were given a voucher! Although I felt horrible most of the way there, I still enjoyed the flight. We said our goodbyes to the students going to Nicaragua in El Salvador and most of the groups left at the airport in San Pedro Sul. 6 of us and Julien bused over to La Ceiba and after 1 group was picked up, the other two groups of us would leave in the morning.
We were able to bond with Julien a little bit and I was able to enjoy my dinner and breakfast without getting sick. The ferry ride to Roatan was about an hour and a half and it wasn’t a terrible ride. Surprisingly, some of the bus rides I have taken in Costa Rica were very much worse than the ferry ride. Of course, I prepared ahead of time with motion sickness tablets and pepto bismol but I was definitely okay. One of the employees of the hospital came and picked us up and took us to our homestay, which in actuality is a hostel. We spoke with our host mom and Leah and I took a trip down to West End to look around for a SIM card and to see what is around. Since it is Sunday, most of everything was closed but we were still able to walk around and see a few stores. We ran into a restaurant with live music in the evening and decided to come back for that! Our walk back home took only about 15 minutes which means we live walking distance to the beach! We enjoyed dinner and then spent our evening at the restaurant! What started off has a rough travel weekend ended to the sound of reggae and food grilling.