Long Live The Sar

I spent yesterday (Wednesday) at Black Lion Hospital, attending the resident's morning report and a guest lecture by an ENT physician from Phoenix, Arizona. The purpose of his talk was to introduce a neonatal hearing screening program that is being started at Black Lion and to explain its importance. The doctor donated a machine that detects otoacoustic emissions from the inner ear that are absent in people with hearing loss. (For extra credit: Does anyone have any theories as to why such a phenomenon even exists? It seems counterintuitive for the ear to produce its own sound). In the US, children who are identified with hearing loss are enrolled in early intervention programs that educate the parents in various forms of communication, such as sign language, beginning at six months; many children who experience this early intervention end up in normal school classrooms and communicate at a level on par with their normal-hearing peers. In the US, children with very severe hearing l...

Friday and Saturday were spent with Rick seeing patients at the Mission. As usual, the days were jam-packed and went from 9:30-4, without any breaks. I still can't figure out how Rick survives most days without eating or drinking. The majority of patients were spine or heart patients, but it is extremely exciting to hear a heart murmur and be able to say something other than "yeah, hmmm, it sounds like water rushing through a pipe." Among the more interesting cases, there is a patient with potential Wilson's disease, a child with Madura head, and a child with Windswept Syndrome. Crazy, crazy stuff. It's odd how normal it seems to see a patient with TB of the spine with a shape like a > or worse. I have been spending a lot of time with Rick's boys, which has been a total blast. They are the warmest, kindest, most fun group of teenagers I have hung out with since the 10th grade. Semegnew, Dejene, and Mesfin are all home for the summer and we have sp...

Returning to Addis has been like becoming reacquainted with an old friend, but something has changed and you can't quite put your finger on it. The city still looks the same (minus the rampant construction) and there are still dirt roads, beggars, and muddy sidewalks galore, but the city has an indescribable energy. I have no idea what the countryside is like and think it's an interesting policy move to export energy to Djibouti before providing energy to the country's rural populations, but I'm blindly trusting that Meles and crew thought this one through...) The changes were readily apparent the moment I stepped through immigration, looked at my phone, and found I had high-speed wifi. Whoa. I kind of looked around to make sure I was actually in Addis; in 2008, there was maybe 1 quasi-high speed internet cafe. Turns out there are a smattering of high-speed places that are a significant improvement over the dial-up days of yore. I spent most of my day in the Bole ...

Although our Guatemala adventure is nearly over, our last few days have been filled with enough activity to warrant their own post. Three days ago, we sadly left El Tortugal and Rio Dulce (but not before partaking in a farewell daquiri and an hour of fishing) for the jungles of northern Guatemala. We elected to take the nice bus, which was great but for the fact that we arrived in Flores in the middle of a rainstorm at night and our hotel was in El Remate, a 40 minute cab ride away. Luckily there were cabs waiting for the bus and one driver agreed to take us for a relatively expensive fee. We arrived at Hotel Mon Ami where we were greeted by the french expat hotel owner. He was very business-like until Liz began speaking French with him and then his eyes shone and a smile appeared. Of course such genial treatment didn´t extend to me (I didn´t want to offend him with my butchering of his romantic language), but Liz´s bi(tri?)-lingual skills served us well. The next morning, we wer...

I have been too busy to write for the past few days. Swimming, reading, fishing, sunbathing, itching mosquito bites, kayaking, and eating are just some of the many leisurely activities that have filled the past three days here on the Rio Dulce. This little slice of heaven is the stretch of river between Lake Izabal and the Caribbean; we are staying at El Tortugal , where they ask you what size your boat is when you reserve a room. Rio Dulce is supposedly the safest place for boats in the Caribbean during hurricane season, however the entrance to the river is only 5.5 ft deep in some places and so larger boats have to be tipped onto their sides to make it through (and this only works during the two extra high tides each month). Our hotel consists of an open dining room over the water, docks running off to either side filled with 30-60' sailboats, and raised walking platforms winding through mangrove swamps to the cabins which have tall ceilings with roofs made of thatched banan...

Since my last post on Friday, we have left Lake Atitlan (after visiting two more towns around the lake, cross-dressing for our hostel´s weekly drag party, and spending the night in a room that strongly resembled a jail cell with its only ventilation coming from the men´s bathroom next door) for Semuc Champey. Our 8-hr bus ride yesterday ended at El Retiro Lodge, a rustic hostel on the outskirts of Lanquin. We were given the room next door to our friends from Iguana Perdida which was nice and then had a nice meal prepared by the local women who work at the lodge - note to all readers and everyone else: never watch your food get prepared in Guatemala...ever. It is not a pretty picture that involves many unwashed hands, silverware used for raw meat, cooked meat, vegetables, oil, and garlic, and in our case, child labor (probably holds true elsewhere but I have seen it here with my own two eyes) Our room was perfectly habitable after I exterminated the alien-esque creature that resembl...

Yesterday morning, Liz and I sadly said goodbye to Antigua (for now) and struck off on the next leg of our adventure, ending in Lake Atitlan . The lake is ringed by volcanic peaks and has stunning scenery . I can't do it justice, so I'm linking to photos of it on Flikr . In a nutshell, the mountains basically project vertically from the lake shore, with "fields" of corn stretching from top to bottom on slopes so steep that I'm sure even mountain goats would tumble to their doom. The ride into Panajachel, the main town, was treacherous to say the least. The roads are steep, have hairpin 179-degree turns, and oh, crazy drivers speeding up straight at you, at speeds only seen on the Autobahn. But we made it and after a short lancha (boat taxi) ride to our hostel, we relaxed for a bit reading in the hammocks, visited a nearby town, and enjoyed a fun Tequila Thursday. But today was truly incredible. Liz and I started the day with delicous eggs and toast outside ...