My name is Sojato

So my Quattro de Julio was not a whole lot different than most other days! We mustered at 0730 in 2AFT, like normal, talked about what was coming up, like normal. But after Muster we didn’t have to do anything else! There’s only so much cleaning and restocking you can do in one little ward, eh? So I went and signed up for a COMREL with RP2 Fields, in the Chaplain’s office. And my good ol’ friend RP3 Strother was there! (RP2 and 3 are their rate and rank, RP stands for Religious Person and 2 is beter than 3) So I hung with him for a bit. We were joined by a Colombian friend of ours, Laura Lara, who’s on the ship with the UCSD Pre-Dental Society, but I think she’s studying political science… But yeah! We all headed up to chow, which was filled with all sorts of random Spanish phrases that Jarvis wanted to learn, such as “Tu eres un ganzo bobo” which means “You are a silly goose.” And I learned more practical words that I could actually use without people looking at me strangely. Such as how to say CJ in Spanish (non-American people never get my name) you pronounce it Sei-Hotah. So Jarvis was trying to tie that into one of his silly phrases and it came out more like Soh-Hatoh, so now my name is Sojato!

After said meal was finished I went to sit with my LDS friends Ashley, Lisa and Emma (Lisa and Emma just came on board recently) and found out that they were all about to go down to the OR and watch an operation! –we haven’t started operations yet, but Operation Smile is on board using our facilities to do a bunch of cleft-pallet repairs- So I joined their little crew and ended up being the only person seeing the operation! The Doctor was a cool Nicaraguan guy who was always laughing in Spanish (jajajaja) about something or other, the nurses all said he was crazy.
The procedure he was doing was a minor cleft pallet in the back of the little boy’s throat, you couldn’t even see it, but he said the muscle on top of the mouth wasn’t connected so the throat couldn’t close correctly to form words and stuff. So he cut open the roof of the mouth, cut the muscles and stitched them together, then stitched the skin back up! I don’t think it was more than 45 minutes, if that. I felt all official in my scrubs, disposable hat, shoe covers and face mask. Purtroppo I don’t have a camera so ya’ll’ll just hafta imagine me!

Then last night we (Me, Lisa and Manuel) were out on the Port-side Weather Deck just talking about something and we saw some fireworks that somebody was shooting up on shore! Pretty neat that they’d do that on our independence day.