Day 3

We had a busy day! We worked from 7:30 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. in the clinic. We had a lot of profoundly deaf patients and sometimes the hearing aids cannot help them, but we also had many people who left our clinic able to hear!
Thanks for all the questions Churchill, room 209!
Some answers:
Hunter, I only know a few Spanish words, but I am trying. I have made some silly mistakes, like saying "you don't speak Spanish," when I wanted to say "I don't speak Spanish. We have interpreters and sometimes even need an interpreter to translate from a Mayan language into Spanish and then another to translate from Spanish into English. Today we had 3 high school students as volunteer interpreters. I wish I had learned Spanish when I was your age.
Kayleigh, sometimes we really have a hard time fitting hearing aids. The ones we have were made for someone else's ears, so we often have to try many of them before one fits. We know that it fits when it is comfortable and the hearing aid doesn't make a horrible squealing with feedback. Today, I could not find a hearing aid to fit a 12-year-old boy so I had to make one by squirting a compound, kind of like play dough, into his ear. When it hardened, I pulled it out, drilled a hole in it, put a tube in it and attached the hearing aid to it.
Hi Millie, I drove from Ottawa to New Jersey for the flight. The drive was about 7 hours; Lisa and i flew from there to Houston,Texas (about 4 hours), then to Guatemala City (about 3 hours). We took a bus to Antigua, another hour. Antigua is surrounded by volcanoes. One of them is named Fuego and is puffing right now. I can see it from our hotel.
Hi Thomas, there are about 45 people from Canada on our medical-surgical team. I think we have people from every province here. Most of us are here for 2 weeks, although there are some who leave after a week, with someone else replacing them next week. I am happy to be here for the full 2 weeks.
Hi Ethan, "diamonds in the rough" was a temporary name, until we thought of something better. Shauna was showing me how to make a blog and she made me pick a name. Do you have any ideas for a better name?