When we arrived in Shell we had a tour of the Saint House and Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) that same afternoon. Yes, I loved seeing all of the planes!
And here I am smiling like an idiot next to one because I was so excited.
My roommate also likes planes quite a bit so I was not the only one getting super excited. :) We really wanted to try to go out with them on an emergency flight, but the only ones that would have possibly had an opening were the ones on the weekends. So, unfortunately that did not happen since we came in Sunday and left Saturday morning.
We did however get to stand in on a surgery!! So cool! One of the missionary doctors is an anesthesiologist and said that it would be a possibility for us non medical interns to watch a surgery. When we were told we could stand in on the upcoming surgery we were so excited that when we were getting our surgical garb on we put our masks on upside down. We didn't realize it until part way through the surgery when one of the other interns realized that we all at a little metal strip down by our chins and all of the other doctors had that by their noses. hahaha. Oh well, it still served its purpose. :) The surgery was to remove an ovarian cyst (which was about the size of a large avocado, or slightly larger!) and since he had her opened up already he took out her appendix as well. So, we got a two for one deal!
When we weren't watching surgeries, the three non medical or non engineering interns cleaned rooms, painted, and did a little laundry. We cleaned and painted emergency room 2, room 14, and one of the nurse's closets/storage rooms. Some of the rooms we cleaned were pretty gross. When we would run across some splatter on the wall or ceiling we would just classify it as miscellaneous debris to try to stop our minds from thinking about what it really might be. In the bathroom in room 14 we spackled, primed, painted, a maintenance guy spackled holes we thought were supposed to be there, and then we painted again. All this happened in about 6 hours. I've never painted the same space in such a short time span, but they were happy.
We had a little extra time at the end of one of our days so we helped with laundry. The washer and dryer were huge! It took the three of us about 20 minutes to fold one load.
The dirty laundry was really dirty! Thank goodness we had large rubber gloves to wear.
On Friday morning we hiked to Hola Vida, one of the waterfalls about 30-40 minutes from Shell. They told us this was a far into the jungle as most of us would be able to go during this trip. It was a nice break from painting and it was refreshing to go swimming in the waterfall.
These were some of the main highlights of our trip to Shell. I could keep writing about the other things, but then this post might the longest post ever written! So, I'll just list some of the other fun things we did. We watched a soccer game, babysat some missionary kids, toured an orphanage, went to Puyo one evening, tried a variety of ice cream, went to an internet cafe when our internet at the guest house stopped working, had a bon fire with some of the hospital employees, and walked across the bridge between the guest house and the hospital as a shortcut and a safer way to get from one point to the other. The wobbling took a little getting used to when our whole group was walking across, but the scenery below was amazing!
Here is peak at one volcano that was pretty easy to spot.
And here is the front of the hospital in Shell.
Shell was a ton of fun and the week flew by! Many of us wished we could have stayed a little longer. :)
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