After finishing the first week of our internship, we all decided to take the weekend to relax and explore the San Jose area a little bit. On Saturday, we went to the Jade Museum near our hotel. It highlighted the different uses of pre-Columbian Jade artifacts that were present throughout Mesoamerica. It was so impressive to see the sculpting of the Jade rocks into jewelry, pottery, ritual artifacts, and other imagery which I assume takes countless hours and a lot of patience to perfect. The museum was 5 floors long so we spent quite a while there before we left for La Tortillia to eat authentic Costa Rican food. We tried chorreada with sour cream and queso which tasted almost like sweet cornbread, it was an interesting taste but I would recommend it. On Sunday, we planned to check out the malls nearby but Katy, Raniyah, and I ended up taking a fun little spontaneous walk around the neighborhood. We checked out some souvenir shops, nearby parks, and bakeries/cafes. That night we also went to La Estacion to try their famous ice cream! They sell taco ice cream, sushi ice cream, and other crazy combinations, but I guess I played it safe with my scoop of mint chocolate chip 🙂

Back to Work

The ice cream was a sweet start to the 2nd week of the internship. On Monday, we got up bright and early to make the 7 am monthly technical meetings at Meditek. It was all in Spanish so I did not really know what was happening but from the numbers and graphs on the presentation, I assume it’s something I don’t really have to worry about. I did get to meet all the field engineers at Meditek, which was fun, especially because they all were forced to introduce themselves in English, but I was also forced to introduce myself in Spanish, so I guess we are even. Anyway, after asking everyone about recommendations of all the beautiful places to see in Costa Rica, we headed out to Rafael Angel Calderon Guardia Hospital to perform preventive maintenance on some Hill-Rom hospital beds and on Anesthesia machines. We learned how to calibrate the anesthesia machine and also how to take it apart to replace a valve and clean it. 

To spice things up for the rest of the week, Katy and I got to travel to Siquirres (a city near Limon) from Tuesday through Friday. We left Meditek on Tuesday morning with Laura and Maira on a 3-hour car ride through route 32 which goes through the mountains and has a beautiful view! The calming rain, the foggy atmosphere, and the surrounding mountain view put me right to sleep for the rest of the ride. Once we got to Siquirres, we had lunch at a cafeteria and I had the very famous, highly recommended, everybody’s favorite..drum roll please…rice and beans! Rice and beans are different than Gallo pinto because rice and beans are made with coconut oil and it is very famous in the Limon area. I loved it so much that I had the same thing for dinner (also because there were no other vegetarian options). After lunch, we went to the Siquirres clinic to look at another anesthesia machine. Maria did a great job at explaining how to properly maintain it and gave Katy and me a chance to take it apart and put it back together. We also wore oversized scrubs that were surprisingly quite comfortable, I just might steal a pair to wear as my PJs. After the workday ended, we drove up to Hotel Pacure where we are staying for the rest of the week. The rest of the day we played card games and ate patacones w/ guac and beans. I learned 3 new card games that I will surely be passing on to others.

The next day was not all that different except we mostly performed preventive maintenance on some hospital beds at the Siquirres clinic, but we also looked at a ventilator and fetal monitor. Even though we mostly observe what the field engineers do, it is cool to get exposure to so many medical devices in different settings. Some machines we look at are at a big public hospital and there might be 30 of the same devices, however, we also go to remote locations where there might be only 1 fetal monitor in the whole area. Hopefully, soon enough we will get to perform maintenance on a device from start to finish on our own. Once we got back to our hotels, we played cards, met Fernandez (another field engineer at Meditek), and ate some more patacones. Patacones are officially my favorite food in Costa Rica, and we sure had a lot of them in Siquirres. 

 

Thursday morning started out a bit different than the rest of the days. We started the morning off by driving past a banana plantation and saw the export work in action. While it was interesting to see the labor work, Fernandez explained the very low wages that these workers receive for the hard labor they perform. It was also despairing to learn that most of the bananas from the plantation are exported and the bananas that do not pass quality control are kept for the locals. Past the banana plantation was a clinic that we visited to fix a fetal monitor. As I mentioned before, some smaller towns only have 1 clinic with very few machines. The clinic we visited only had 1 fetal monitor in the whole area. On the ride back, we had a conversation with Fernandez about Seguro social and Meditek which gave us a better insight into how the services that Meditek provides are financed. Seguro Social also referred to as Caja is a government-run healthcare system that is free for everyone in Costa Rica and funds all the public hospitals. For the rest of the day, we went to the Siquirres clinic to perform preventive maintenance on surgical beds and lights in the OR room.

 

Since we are so close to the Caribbean, Katy and I decided to take a bus down to Puerto Veijo and stay for the weekend! We took the time today to relax on the beautiful beaches here in Puerto Viejo. Tomorrow we plan on going to a national park and waterfall, more on that next week 😉

 

In other news, we will be back at Hotel Selina on Sunday which means back to grocery shopping and cooking dinner in the common kitchen. I do miss some of our “home-cooked meals” and can’t wait to have our daily walks to the market with Raniyah, Laurel, and Katy. 

Also big shoutout to Katy for being my personal translator this whole trip and keeping me in the loop in the Spanish conversations so I don’t look too lost. 

 

Till next time,

Jhalak M.