Monday, March 1, 2010

I was busy preparing for the training today. Leah went into the hospital for what we think is a kidney infection. She knew a man here that drove us over and helped get her checked into the emergency room. It turns out his classmate is the vice president of the hospital and president of some doctor’s association for all of the Philippines. When we mentioned his name in the emergency room, it was like everyone stopped and had to take a deep breath. We were very impressed with the hospital that is close by. Very clean, very friendly, very knowledgeable staff. Only in the Philippines would they recommend Balut to a nauseous person (especially Leah who can’t stomach most of the food here). Balut is a fertilized egg….so it has a beak and feathers within the egg….apparently it's something I will have to eat before I leave. And I’m scared.

I spent the entire day picking up supplies, packing things, and getting organized. I had a huge stack of papers to be photocopied in order to be distributed at my training. The person photocopying for me left in the middle of the day (which I didn’t realize until it was 5:00pm and time to go home). So I walked into the room and the well organized stack I had given him, although mostly photocopied, was in disarray and I had no idea where to start. Plus the copier was all out of paper. Irrational panic and frustration started to set in. I still needed to go back to the hospital to see Leah, so Edgar calmed me down, offered to go pick up the copy paper, and said he would help me when I got back.

After getting back from the hospital (now around 6pm), I got out of the cab in front of my building to see all the lights in the street just go out. I thought it was an electrical shortage, which I know now was a scheduled blackout, but I still needed to organize at least day 1 of the papers that had been photocopied (about 30 pages for each people for each day). We had 2 keychain flashlights and lights from our cell phones that we placed throughout the room so we could minimally see. It was kind of comical how ridiculous we all looked trying to put these papers together in the dark. We got Day 1 done, thanks to everyone who came in to help me, and just stuffed the rest of the papers in a box to be organized when we got to Samar. I knew a lot of the sets of papers would have missing sheets because there were various numbers of leftovers when we got to the end of our organizing, when we should not have had any. We ended up leaving around 7, still needed to pack and go back to the hospital before getting up at 2am to leave for the airport. Stresssssssssssss