week 2

The first weekend in Panama we went to the La Luna Resort on the beach. It was absolutely gorgeous. We had the whole resort to ourselves. It was a good time for all of us to get to know each other a lot better and spend some time relaxing in a some what “normal” way. It was definitely a different scene then in Chitre. I was happy for the break but was excited to get back because we had so much more to see and learn in Chitre. No one really appeared like they wanted to go back to the town since the beach was so gorgeous. We convinced our wonderful teachers to allow us one more dinner out on the way home because we got spoiled during the weekend eating really good food. The second week in Chitre went by pretty quickly. We had clinicals every day and a group teaching project due at the end of the week to teach little kids about dental health. Our clinicals were very different then the clinicals we experience here. We got to do pap smears and go out into the community and do a sort of home health care thing. The nursing students there will spend like one full day just doing vaccinations all day or one full day doing this or that. Our program at USF is not set up like that so it was cool to see a different way of doing things and it gave me a lot of practice giving injections at different sites on the body to people of all sizes and shapes.
Los Santos was the town we were staying in which our clinic was in. On that second Thursday, June 3, 2010 they had a festival called Corpus Christi. I know it was some sort of religious festival but I am not really too sure about the story behind it. We had a health fair in the middle of it and people were coming from every which direction to get free H1N1 vaccinations and free blood pressure readings. This was also very different then the United States, we would never just stand on the streets with vaccinations giving them out to whomever passed by. We mainly gave them to the middle school/ high school aged children that were helping set up the festival. I think this was one of the most fun/interesting days we had there. I got to witness a real cultural activity that they do there. It was beautiful, they spend all day outlining these designs in chalk and then filling them in very meticulously with different colored flower petals all down the streets. It was amazing how much time and effort they put into it and when it was done the roads looked absolutely gorgeous.