Day 19

Monday

Things were a little crazy with the arrangements as to who did what and when, because the group from Wisconsin planned a trip to Perú in the middle of their time here. It was a little tense among the groups here for a while, but it was all worked out in the end. The CDI for the week was going to be put on by the Wisconsin group Mon- Wed and then the rest of Thurs & Fri doing physical exams. But, Monday morning we found out that the kids were on vacation so no one was there Monday. The Wisconsin group stayed up fairly late Sunday night preparing, but it worked out in the end because they had extra time to get it organized.

Meanwhile, I gave Seth & Ava a short tour of the hospital, where we talked to the Pastor for quite some time. He is a jolly fellow and has a passionate love for the Lord and for people which is so very inspiring. After the tour we got to observe the gynecologist with a couple of his patients. After all of his patients, we were told the ophthamologist had 5 patients (which is a lot for this hospital, especially in just a couple of hours) and we observed him. He was really great to learn from because he would ask us questions like "What 3 things do you look for in the back of the eye?"or "What is normal vision or normal pressure of the eye?" We definitely got to learn a lot and it was really nice being able to learn from someone who really tried to teach. Each of his patients had different problems so we got to see several different things within the morning. It was my favorite day at the hospital so far!

Came back and had lunch. We tried to go to this mansion downtown to walk through but Monday is kind of the "day of rest"here, so some of the very nice restaurants and other cultural sites aren't open. We got to wander through the gardens though, and that was quite lovely! I have several pictures of that as well. I am nearly convinced I could open my own Cochabomba postcard company! After that we attempted to go to this taxidermy exhibit of sorts...turns out it's mostly of bugs but it's free and they wanted to charge money since we are Americans (and Canadians). So we decided it wasn't worth it. After that, Iris wanted to take us to these botanical gardens. Well, apparently Iris & Tomás used to go there but the government doesn't really want to keep up with them. So it wasn't quite as green as you would expect botanical gardens to be. However, we noticed while walking through that that definitely didn't stop several couples from going there! :-)

Then we went to the market for a bit because Seth had left his coat on the bus and needed to buy some warm clothing. We American girls are always up for souvenir shopping of course, and I found a key chain holder that I had been wanting to buy since the first day I went to the souvenir place. An exceptionally important thing that was purchased, were 260 toothbrushes! My dad kindly donated $50 towards getting toothbrushes for these kids who needed them. So for 260 toothbrushes, I paid the equivalent of $23. Amazing, huh? After the market, not sure what we did...

I just double checked my journal and I am slightly apalled at myself for having forgot Monday night's dinner! So we got home a bit late and didn't really have a whole bunch of food to choose from, so we decided to get creative. Amy & I were trying to come up with some sort of culinary concoction and decided on some sort of mixture involving cream cheese, bread and quasi-bruschetta. We decided to call it, Bolivian bruschetta. We cut up some tomatoes, onions, garlic & cilantro, and threw in lime juice too. Then we put cream cheese on hot dog buns, which are nothing like hot dog buns back home, more like fresh bread kind of and they taste much better than sliced bread here. We put the bruschetta stuff on top and then put them in the oven (Ava's idea) until warm. It was delicious and Amy, Ava & I were thrilled to eat dinner! All who had the extra were grateful as well. I'm pretty sure after that, we were content and ready for bed.