Michael: News

Alone on the wire
Without the colorful feathers
To attract a mate.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

We toured the new hospital in Volcan yesterday. I don’t have much experience with hospitals but it seemed very state of the art to me. Right now we know the emergency room is open from 7a.m. to 3p.m.  daily and the general health clinic is open from 7-5. By the end of the year the emergency room is scheduled to operate 24 hours a day. Eventually the hospital is slated to be a fully operational class 4 hospital, the highest level, which means it will also provide surgical services. Right now it’s considered a class 2 facility.

From what we could glean from our visit, it appears that many Panamanians go to the local clinics or to a local general practice physician. The hospital clinic was largely being used by the indigenous population that must not be able to afford a family doctor. Hopefully we’ll learn more about how the health care system here operates at a meeting tomorrow.

The other big news is that the Panama City hiking club is making the long drive here this weekend to clean up the Western Trail. Kimme and I just hiked that trail last week and were talking about how cleaning up that trail  was going to be our way of contributing to the local community. The Panama City group and any other volunteers that want to help are going to start at 8 a.m. Saturday.

Today Kimme and I are going to head up to the peak and back down to scout out how we feel it would be best for us to contribute to the clean up operation. We wouldn’t mind hiking to the camp near the peak, but feel an 8 a.m. start is a little late given the weather forecast. If the weather turns ugly that camp might not be cleaned up so we might start out earlier on Saturday to make sure we can get there in time to at least start to clean up that camp. We know it’s going to take us close to 5 hours to reach the uppermost camp. Very shortly we’re going to find out how long it will take to come down from that area. That will also help me figure out the logistics of a marathon over the peak and into Boquete and back trip.