Before today nothing on this trip was a huge culture shock, but today was very eye opening for me. Our first stop today was a poor public hospital named Hospital Paroissien. It was nothing like the private hospitals we viewed. It was not very well maintained and was run down. There was a lot of dust and mosquitos throughout the building. This was hard to see, it makes you wonder why no one is trying to improve the environment when there are private hospitals that look like 5 star hotel rooms. From there we visited Universidad Nacional de La Matanza.

One aspect of today I really enjoyed was getting to talk to the students and faculty of the university. They guided us through the hospital and it gave us the opportunity to hear from them first hand. When we got to the university we were taken on a quick tour of the campus and it was beautiful. It was so interesting to me that it is a public university and those it is completely free to get an education.

I met Ailin, a 3rd year nursing student at the university and we had the opportunity to talk for a while. Her name is pronounced exactly like my middle name, Eileen. This was very cool to see the different pronunciation and spelling of the same name. She let me try her Yerba Mate which is similar to a loose leaf tea, but instead of steeping in a bag, you drink it through a special straw that filters the leafs out. It reminded me of green tea. This was something I knew I wanted to try while I was here because of how much everyone here raves about it.

We spent a lot of time talking about the similarities and differences between our universities. I think the biggest difference was in the US after 4 years you are an RN with a bachelors degree, where as here after 3 years you are considered a professional nurse, and you can continue your education 2 more years to be trained on a specific specialty. This is very different to the U.S. because all it takes is a BSN to work in any specialty. Unless you want to go to graduate school to become a specific type of nurse like a nurse practitioner. But in argentina that is not even a possibility. In Argentina dorms are not a thing. People commute hours to school everyday. One thing we did find was we take very similar classes. We both were talking about struggling with Anatomy and it was really cool to see that even being so far from home we have similar educations.

Today really opened my eyes to a lot of things and made me grateful for what I often neglect to appreciate. It made me realize just how similar everyone is all across the world.