Home Away from Home

One of the most interesting things about this program is that I get to call San Cristobal Island in the Galapagos my home for three months.  This was especially apparent when I felt like I was coming home after our island hopping tour yesterday.  It was really great to be back on San Cristobal and feel so comfortable here. 
Before I start talking about the island hopping, I need to go back a few more days.  I omitted something that happened on Wed of the last week of Marine Ecosystems class.  We went diving again, this time to Kicker Rock.  It was absolutely incredible.  Going down between the two giant rocks sticking out of the ocean and seeing the animals there was so exciting.  We saw so many corals and sea urchins and fish.  We also saw about 30 sharks (all of them black-tip or Galapagos sharks), several sea turtles (one of them being cleaned by a barberfish), and eagle rays.  It was really cool.  Some of the sharks got within five or six feet of us.  One of them started swimming directly for me.  I was only slightly terrified at that point.  Luckily he just looked at us and then veered off. 
So, the reason I didn't mention any of this before was that when we surfaced, there were a bunch of people on a random boat yelling at us to climb aboard, that something had happened on our boat.  It took a while to learn the whole story, but apparently the naturalist guide on one of our boats (not the one I was on) was snorkeling and had a heart attack.  He was my host brother's wife's brother.  When I got home my host mom told me.  It was a really scary and weird experience.  Within a few minutes it seemed like the entire island (or at least the whole town) knew about it.  I wasn't sure how to talk about this last week, so I just didn't.
The man died while they were trying to find competent medical care on the island.  Apparently the hospital didn't have oxygen to give him.  The family was thinking about suing, but I'm not sure how that's turned out.  The experience was really sad and upsetting for a lot of people.  It was frustrating to me that I had no clue how to comfort my host mom, either in terms of the words to say or the appropriate things to do culturally.