Easing back in

The week was hot and humid, and had everyone expressing their surprise at such heat at the end of August. We'll look back one day and say, remember when?

We are very thankful for the fan we have. Jake unplugs it and carries it with him wherever he happens to be sitting. We also purchased a back up cordless fan, which has definitely come in clutch during those nightly power outages.

We went back to the hospital on Thursday. We were told we could take the whole week to settle. All of the Honduran docs had been instructed to only reach out to me for absolute emergencies. But, we were both ready to jump back in at that point. Monday - Wednesday we had made daily trips to La Ceiba buying furniture and necessities. We both agreed that the washer and dryer were first on our list. In such a hot climate, the relief we both received from simply having an easy way to wash our clothes, kind of caught me off guard. What part of our culture caused that kind of prioritization. I didn't think I valued cleanliness that high, but to prioritize wash, over a bed, maybe I do. And then we would also pick a different hardware store to visit each day. We would walk down those aisles and Jake would gaze around with a look of awe and wonder on his face, pointing out items or parts that would no longer be available in the US as replacing a broken item has overtaken repairing a broken item in the US.

Friday, today, was another day at the hospital for me while Jake ran around to different meetings. It was a lot of catch up from what has happened around the hospital and campus over the past few months we've been gone. There was a scheduled power outage all day, so we both ended up doing our work down at the hospital where we could plug our computers in, etc.

This evening, multiple things happened almost simultaneously. Well, if not simultaneous, in very rapid succession. 1) It rained. 2) Power returned 3) We roasted marshmellows with our neighbors 4) Jake was called to the hospital for a generator issue

The rain didn't completely douse our fire. Marshmellows will be roasted!

I'll let Jake explain the generator emergency.

(Jake here) Brevity is not a strength of mine but I'll give it a shot here as i try to explain what happened with the generators. The initial call was for the UPS's in the hospital continuously beeping (which is their way of saying they are upset about something). I went down and met with Jared and Rosmel and we checked the transfer switch first and it said it was on grid power, but the generator was running still. So we went down stairs and checked the generator and found that it was still powering the hospital, and only running at 56 hertz (needs to be 60), which basically means it wasn't spinning fast enough. So already we had two issues. One being the transfer switch not switching back to the grid, and two being that the generator is running slow. So we fired up the second generator and manually transfered the load over to it so we were back at 60Hz but we were still on generator power and not grid power. At this point Rosmel, Jared, and I paused for moment to talk through the system, essentialy it was our own form of Rubber Duck Debugging, but with added features of english and spanish colliding into each other in a rather humorus manner.

So after much discussion we decided it was late, and we would just manual switch the hospital to the grid and call it a night and come back tomorrow. So I went downstairs to turn off the generator to perform the change over and noticed the controller was indicating it was on grid power, and also indicating it had a load on it (i.e. the hospital). So i wondered if maybe the controller and transfer switch were just out of sync. So I switched the controller over to generator, then back to grid, and the lights flicked and the generator load went to zero. I ran upstairs and Rosmel and Jared confirmed the transfer switch had changed over. So kind of by accident I guess we got things back in sync. So while we still have a generator that is offline, we at least have the rest of the system working correctly now and can come back later to figure out this other generator issue.

How was that for brevity and easing back in?

Much Love and Keep after it!