Panama

It is the morning of our 5th day in Panama and I am back to work in the ICU. Our first 2 days in every country are spent on shore screening and organizing the surgery patients then day 3 or 4 the surgeries begin and the ICU starts jumpin!!! I worked at the clinic site yesterday, herding cats aka patients. It was a good day, the clinic site is in a run down gymnasium so it could get a little loud and the patients often got lost moving from the check in to the general medicine line so my job was to find them and direct them to the appropriate places. There were tons of children so most of my day was spent playing kick the can with them around the gym...a good time as had my all.
The ship is port side here in Panama which has been great for efficency in the morning/evening, getting to/from the clinic sites and we can get off the boat at night and enjoy a stroll on the pier. Not quite as nice as it sounds, the pier is a shipping yard so there are boxes all around and lots of disel fumes but, it is land and there is a small mall structure set up for ships.
In Columbia we were joined by 20 more Project Hope volunteers so our presence is stronger on the ship, for a week or so there were only 6 of us. The new excited energy is a nice addition to the ship's crew.
We are here in Panama until June 2 and then we travel through the canal on our way to Columbia... I am excited to see the canal. I am told there is a web cam on the canal on which you can see us as we pass through...check it out. I will work on finding the web site but until then google panama canal web cam and look for us on June 3rd!!!