Yesterday I took a nap instead of writing a post. So there
you have it.
Today (Tuesday), was business as usual, with a little bit of
extra stuff for me. Rather, I got kind of bored with the dispensary stuff, and
there were no kids because they were school. Plus, Jefa Sandy wanted to teach
me how to locate glasses in the inventory, and I didn’t really want to do that,
especially because I get pulled in enough different directions already without
having to get called away for interpreting in the middle of finding
glasses for
a patient.
Anyway.
The last two days, the technicians on our team have been
teaching two students from San Pedro Sula how to make glasses. Now, this is
complicated to do in English. And the students don’t speak much English. So
Marian and I have been stumbling through the directions that Dick gives us
about the various machines and technical stuff. Sometimes it’s really
difficult, between the technical vocabulary and the complicated directions. At
one point, one of the guys asked me to tell the student to “spot it in” and I
had no idea what he was talking about. I asked him what he meant, but he said,
“Just tell them to spot it in, they’ll know what it means.” I had to say, “Um,
yeah, but I don’t know what it means,
so you’re gonna have to describe to me the process of ‘spotting it in’ so that
I can describe it to them.” We had several moments like that. Along with
looking up the words for “bevel,” “axis,” “trace,” and “centralize.”
Something interesting that happened yesterday and today was
that crews from two television news networks came to interview Dr. Bob about
the clinic and the work we were doing here. And, of course, since he doesn’t
speaking Spanish, they elected me to be his interpreter! It was a little bit
scary at first, but it turned out to be not too difficult. The second interview
went better because I stopped Dr. Bob more often to interpret and then I didn’t
have an entire paragraph to remember. Turns out that’s the key. Who would have
thought?
I spent at least half of today being the interpreter for
Nisha, one of the doctors who I’ve become really good friends with. We’re the
same age and we have perhaps too much fun together. Lots of laughter. Lots of
giggling. Lots of broken Spanish. It’s a good time. I was getting a bit tired
of the dispensary, and Nisha was getting a lot tired of her interpreter who was
prone to texting during every spare moment, so I sat down at her exam station
and took over. It was a lot of fun! It was a whole different set of phrases and
instructions, plus more questions and answers from the patients, so I got to do
interpretation in both directions. Plus, it was Nisha. I always love it when
you can meet someone and become instant friends during a trip. I’ll probably
not see her again after this trip (unless we meet up on another of these trips)
because she lives in Canada and looooves to travel. But that’s okay. There’s
always Facebook, right?
I suppose that’s all for now. We’re heading out to dinner in
20 minutes or so, with a cultural dance demonstration after that. I’ll post
pics on the blog when we get back to the States, the internet just isn’t fast
enough here in the hotel. ¡Buen día!
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