the next day in costa rica was spent in our different groups again. one group went to the hospital again with dr mellick (the ent) and audrina and helped with pediatric testing and more hearing aid verifications.
my group went to the helen keller institute in san jose. this was a place where adults could go who were hard of hearing and also had vision problems. many of the people knew they had some sort of hearing loss, but weren't sure how significant it was. and almost every single person had such bad vision problems they had to use a walking stick. when we got there first thing in the morning, there was a huge room filled with people waiting for us to test their hearing. we didn't even get through the line of people until about 4 that afternoon. at this location, we did a whole lot of hearing screenings, wax removal (for some reason, i kept getting every person that had an ear canal completely blocked with wax), and those identified with hearing loss were fit with hearing aids. it was a great day, we got a lot done, and we met some fabulous and inspiring people!
after a long day at each of our locations, we packed our bags up and drove the 3 1/2 hours to a town called morales just north of puntarenas on the pacific coast. we arrived at an extension campus for the university of costa rica where they studied marine life. all the girls stayed in one room with about 20 bunkbeds and the boys stayed in the room next to us. we had semi community showers (boys and girls were separate) and the bathrooms made me semi nervous. but we were grateful for a place to sleep especially since they let us stay there for free. 
one upside to staying at this campus site was that they had an area close to the water filled with crocodiles! big ones, medium sized ones, and smaller ones. there were so many of them! we each got a turn holding one of the baby ones and as tough as i tried to act about the whole situation- i was scared out of my mind. they didn't have rubber bands on their mouthes or anything and it made me a little nervous that it could snap at me anytime. but i toughened up and held one just long enough to get a picture!
this is marta- she worked with dr mellick in the hospital and helped organize our trip and helped drive us all around costa rica. she spoke little english, but when we talked to her with a translator, she was hilarious! she also had hearing aids on both ears and hopes to get on the list to receive a cochlear implant within the next year. 
on thursday and friday, our group headed to a school called judas (strange, i know). we spent both days doing screenings and more diagnostic testing. we tested every kid in the school (there were like 500 kids in that school) as well as many of their parents, siblings, and other random people from the surrounding villages that heard we were there to help. the kids at this school were adorable and we had a lot of fun with them- especially when i tried to use the little spanish i had learned to talk to them. they just kept laughing at me and telling me i was saying everything wrong. haha
lunch time at this school was fun. first, the ladies cooked us some fabulous authentic costa rican food- better than any food we had ordered in the restaurants- and the music teacher brought his guitar to us and he and andrew started a jam session. 
there were 16 of us that were going on this trip and we all flew on different flights. my group had our first flight leaving monday, may 4 at 6am. that made for an extremely early morning for all of us. we were supposed to fly from slc to dallas to orlando to miami to costa rica (ridiculous, i know). however, our first airplane had mechanical problems, our flight got cancelled, and we had to book another flight on a different airline. lucky for us, we took a delta flight straight to orlando skipping the dallas layover. 
we all finally made it to san jose about 9pm that night (longest traveling day ever) and surprisingly enough, all 3 groups arrived within 30 minutes of each other. talk about great timing. we were taken to our hotel in san jose (which was surprisingly nice) and crashed. dr sebastian mellick (an ear-nose-throat doctor in costa rica) helped us organize our entire trip. he found places who needed audiological services and set up the times/dates for each of the locations. we got up super early the next morning (5:30) and headed off to our different locations. we had 3 different places to go to so we split into different groups each day. my group for the first day went to cencinai which was a preschool filled with children. here, we performed otoscopy (looked in their ears at their eardrums to make sure the canal was clear and the eardrum looked good), tympanometry (a test making sure the ear drum is working properly and there is equal pressure between the outer and middle ear), and then we did a hearing screening on all of the children. costa rica has socialized health care, so the children we identified with hearing loss at this school were referred to an audiologist that worked in that area. 
after cencinai, we drove to kinder papillon. this was a school run by a fabulous lady named carla. a few of her students had hearing aids, a couple even had cochlear implants, but many of her students needed to be tested. so, we did the same tests on these children that we did at the preschool earlier. however, at this school, any child that was identified with a hearing loss was fit with hearing aids that we had donated by hearing aid companies here in the us. here, we met adriana, a costa rica native and a graduate student studying audiology. she is currently working as an audiologist but had some equipment donated to her that she didn't know how to use. this equipment is excellent for verifiying that the way you program a hearing aid is what that child's hearing loss would require. we spent a great deal of time teaching and training adriana on how to use her equipment and we were able to make sure that these children had appropriately programmed hearing aids. 
my dad is a big utes fan and i bought all the stuff to make him this "u" back in november for his birthday. but i never got around to it... until now. i think he'll love it. 
on sunday night, i got all my crafting supplies out and made these flower and ribbon bows for little baby headbands for some of my cute, pregnant friends. i spent about 5 hours on them and ended up making about 50 of them. this is only a small sample. 
my name is liz, and i am a craft-a-holic
