25 ambulances working out of the clinic

Tacos with shredded beef

Tacos de pescado

And now, a little look in to driving in Hermosillo! I was fortunate enough to drive my own car down, a 1994 Isuzu Trooper, and only experienced the air conditioning stop working for about one hour on the five hour long drive down.

The streets of Hermosillo were not built to provide for the large number of people now living in the city, and this is seen by almost all roads covered in large potholes or cracks. There is a saying here that at night, police don't pay any attention to drivers swerving on the road but instead choose to pull over people who drive straight down the road, not avoiding any of the many obstacles. In addition, people constantly drive with their emergency lights on--no idea why. There are painted lanes on a few of the largest roads of the city, but they really don't mean anything. It's important to be a very defensive driver because it is common that in order to avoid a car that may be making a turn or driving too slow, a driver will run into you and drive off like nothing happened. Furthermore, the speed limits mean nothing. Some of the largest boulevards in the city randomly change from 60 km/h to 20 km/h without any warning; the good news is my car doesn't have the slightly smaller speedometer in km/h so I can ignore the signs with good conscience.

Without fail, at every intersection there is a stop sign. You are allowed to ignore the stop sign if the light is green unless there is a cop who is having a bad day, then he can pull you over for running the stop sign. Additionally, you can spend time in jail for small traffic infringements; I'm thinking if I'm pulled over here I will only speak English and try to play the naive foreigner card.

For now, I'm delighted to say that I have not been involved in any accidents, pulled over, or had my car stolen. Hopefully none of that will change!

On my way to work. Also, buses do not give a damn about anyone.

This week I have exciting news! After multiple meetings with my adviser, we both decided it would be more beneficial and impacting for me to change focus of my SRP, fulfilling a more administrative role in the Red Cross. Before, I was planning to participate in a multitude of different volunteer roles within the organization to understand the work the Red Cross does across the state of Sonora. For example, I was planning to work in the office helping respond to calls, work in the countryside distributing aid packages, and shadow first aid workers in emergency vehicles. This work certainly would have been interesting, but it seemed to unfocused and disorderly. 

I now plan to work in the largest clinic in Hermosillo, located on Blvd. Luis Encinas, helping the head of administration Paulina Corona. The Red Cross is one of the largest medical aid providers in the country but with all this work, they have not had the proper time or resources to develop a good way of organizing information pertaining to their patients or doctors. Part of my new task is creating a template for patient registration and retention to organize and store information for patient files. The clinic I am working in offers many specialist doctors in addition to a general practitioner so I will also be helping create patient registration sheets for specific doctors, for example the information asked by a gynecologist will be different from that of a dentist. Finally, I will be helping to better plan and schedule the hours of availability of certain doctors who volunteer their time in the clinic for only a few hours a week to make the most of that valuable time and lastly will attempt to track the most busy hours of the week to better manage our allocation of resources.

I believe my reassignment will prove more beneficial in the long run to not only the organization, but myself. It will be rewarding to be involved in building a steady infrastructure for this organization in order to help them provide even more good to their patients.

                 

The official commencement of my project.

Also known as 911.

Hermosillo, Sonora

It's customary to eat tacos the first night. To anyone who's curious, the tacos were of slowly roasted marinated pork and fresh cheese on a flour tortilla.

Hello! My name is Alejandro Durazo and I am a senior at BASIS Tucson North, class of 2015. Students at our school have an accelerated curriculum highly saturated with Advanced Placement exams so that technically they are eligible to graduate junior year or participate in a final year that is far from normal. The first two trimesters of senior year focus on college applications and supplemental essays while our third trimester we are encouraged to create a research project to occupy our time for the remaining three months.

I decided to spend my new amount of free time away from school in Hermosillo, Sonora volunteering for the Mexican Red Cross. During my stay, I will be volunteering in a multitude of roles in the organization to ascertain a sense of the work done across the state of Sonora. My onsite advisers are Lic. Carlos Freaner Figueroa and Lic. Adrián Camou Loera.

The Red Cross here in Mexico does a tremendous job of providing reliable medical attention, all not for profit, and I wish to shine some light on the people who make that possible!

I am very grateful for this opportunity our school provides to conduct this senior research project (SRP) and look forward to my work with the Red Cross.

Thank you for reading, please feel free to leave comments.