Today was an eventful and busy day: Alex drove us to the DIF (the Mexican equivalent of the YMCA as far as we can tell) for an appointment he had made a year ago. Alex recommended that we wear our scrubs. We met with a man who is, according to his title of contador, an accountant but is also in charge of a lot of the programs, and before we knew it Alex and the contador had arranged for us to go out to our first community tomorrow morning. This was very exciting news but it also meant that all of the things we had to get done this week, we had to get done TODAY. We found out that we also needed to take out money to pay for our room and board ASAP, but found that the customer service associated with our bank account set up for the trip was a little less than helpful. After an hour or so of skyping with the customer service line, sending various emails to our very helpful UNC support system in the Office of International Affairs, and trying to think of other ways to access our money while in Mexico, we sorted out a temporary solution.
Next, we spent the afternoon in Office Depot (still wearing scrubs) printing out all sorts of consent forms and surveys for our studies during our health fairs. Everyone, including the Office Depot girl helping us transfer our files to print, got a kick out of the titles of some of Jason’s files on his flashdrive. 14,000 printed pages later (incidentally, this medical volunteer work does NOT coincide with environmental volunteer work), we stopped by the grocery store to pick up some ingredients to make homemade toothpaste, bought some towels since the instruction of “BYOT” was not conveyed to us until we got down here, and learned some new words in the fabric store (cintamétricos = tape measure, and chiquira = bead). Lauren and I also splurged on fancy coffee drinks to take the edge off of the warm day, and found, to our dismay, the pesos my father has been saving since he was last in Mexico (maybe 20 years ago?) are no longer valid. BUT the old pesos are very cool, and the guys at the coffee shop were pretty amused by the two American girls that came by and tried to by coffee with obsolete currency.
Tomorrow is our first day in the trenches, as they say. It’s been a lot to throw together in one day in terms of preparing our “charlas” (our talks on various health topics), but it will definitely be a matter of learning on the job.
Other highlights from today: Kelly made delicious enchiladas with salsa verde. I think this has been my favorite meal in Mexico so far. Alex took us to the “Mirada” or lookout point where we could see the entire city. It was a great view of San Miguel, and we spotted a few of the places we’re planning on visiting (namely, the hospital and la parroquia – or the really big, pretty, main church in the city).
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