My first day...4 de Julio (miercoles)– Day 2

4 de Julio (miercoles)– Day 2
At around 9 am Tio Luis and I went to the clinic, la casa, to introduce me to the director and the doctor. I was wearing shorts. I don’t think the doctor liked that. He sent me home to change and wanted me to return to start today instead of tomorrow. Then Tio told him and the other midwives that although I might take a while to respond in Spanish, that I can understand a lot if it’s spoken to me. Oh crap. The truth is I can barely understand anything from a native speaker. I can pick out only common nouns from speech such as cabeza and cerbeza. I think only one of those words is going to be any help in a medical clinic. So I suffered through about 3 hours of watching Dr. Rodriguez see a few patients. Much of the clinic is actually a materinity ward. When the doc went to see a neonate he noticed it wasn’t breathing well, became a little frantic and told me something in the Spanish which I interpreted as “go get a midwife quick.” I went in the hall and realized if I found a midwife I wouldn’t know what to say to her. He ran out of the room with the baby and went down the all to another room and told me to turn on the oxygen. Again, I couldn’t understand a word he said so he had to do it himself. He listened to the babies left lower lobe and had me listen to it. It was very congested. After a few minutes of suction and oxygen it was all clear. That was pretty cool. After that a few more patient then Girardo came to pick me up, more like rescue me. We went home for about an hour then he brought me to an internet café. After I finished with the computer I sat with him in his tiny shop of electronics and computer goods. We taught each other words like stream (arroyo) and wheel (llanta). I think that was about it. Oh yeah escaleta is stairs. Tio luis brought me to the library and we found out that there are free classes I guess tomorrow. After that it was back to home for dinner and sequence. Then to Mega for grocery shopping. It’s hard to get other people to buy food for you. I don’t like it. Especially if they are likely going to prepare it for you. I found out that 5 year old Mitsy knows the English alphabet better than I know the Spanish alphabet. That’s sad. I’m finding I cannot understand virtually anything with certainty. In Spanish class I could sometimes grab a very vague idea of was being said by the people on the cassette recording. But here it’s completely different. Most times I cannot tell if they are asking me a question or telling me something that I should know for later. A lot of people who have been on similar trips abroad say that there is one day where everything “clicks” and that the language becomes much easier to manage. I kinda doubt that that will happen to me. So tomorrow I’m going to the clinic at 8 in the morning and will supposedly be drawing blood and giving injections. Oh yeah, I have not done either before except for the occasional arterial stick. Should be fun…