New volunteers at the clinic

The morning started off like many others – I woke up early, ate breakfast (pancakes with maple syrup, papaya and bananas…yum yum!) and walked to the bus stop. I arrived at the clinic at about 8am and we started to triage the patients.

At about 8:30am two medical students from America arrived and started to help – they loved the babies and always wanted to play with them instead of actually triaging the patients!! But it was fine as there weren’t that many patients and by 9:30am the triaging was mainly complete.

For some reason one of the doctors wasn’t in (again) and so the one doctor had to see all of the patients.

As the medical students wanted to sit in with the doctor, I let them and I sat outside to triage any new patients that arrived.

At 12pm we made our way back to Antigua – and I rushed home for lunch before heading to the school to meet my tandem. Her name was Helga and she was learning basic English – pretty much at the same level as my Spanish. It was nice to spend time just talking in Spanish and I think that it’s one of the best ways to improve fluency as you have to think very quickly about what to say and that allows for quicker vocabulary recall compared to written exercises. You also try to construct sentences that you are not sure about and the person speaking to you corrects you which helps you improve your language.

I spent the rest of the day at home resting.