A fairly busy week...

Well the week has just whizzed by! There seems to have been a lot going on.

On Tuesday night I had one of the most bizarre experiences! A group of guys from Northern Ireland have been visiting and were staying in the training centre accommodation while they visited various schools in the area before they headed of to Jinja to do some mission work with YWAM. They had organised a film evening where all the staff and students at Kiwoko were invited to come up to the HIV shelter to watch a film together. The HIV shelter is basically a building with no walls which is used for clinics a couple of times a week. It seemed a bit strange heading out once it was dark but we made sure we covered up and were all stinking of the mosquito spray!! So we all headed up there from the guesthouse and as expected nobody had really turned up yet (It can be difficult to decide whether to go African time or Muzungu time as sometimes you are caught off guard when people actually mean the time they say!!) Someone was selling pop corn, so we got some to eat as we were sitting on the concrete floor starting to watch Indiana Jones which was projected up onto the wall. It must only have been a few minutes into the film when the whole sky around us light up! We realised after this happening a few times that it was lightening and we thought it might pass soon. But it continued for the whole film with thunder adding to the excitement in parts! So here we were watching Indiana Jones in the middle of a thunderstorm sitting on a mat on concrete floor under a roof while bats flew over our heads and lizards were casually running up and down the wall beside the film! It was a really good night, although the rain seemed to hold out until the film finished, so we had to run back to the guesthouse in the dark getting a bit wet. By this point the power had gone and the generator was off, so it was reading by candle light before bed!

On Wednesday the Male ward was moved back into their original building which has just been renovated and extended slightly. I only realised how cramped the ward they had been in was when I saw the space there was in the new ward! (Though even in the new ward the beds are a lot closer together than wards at home!) It seems really spacious and is lovely and bright having been newly painted. One side is for surgical cases and one is for Medical and they have isolated rooms for each side now as well as a separate part on the end for highly infectious diseases. It all went really smoothly and everything including patients seemed to be moved within a few hours! It did take a wee bit longer to locate our patients but other than that I was just amazed at how quickly it all happened with everyone just mucking in!

We had a meeting that morning with some of the workers from the HIV department about the kids club that they run once a month for kids with HIV. They call the club ‘Afaayo’ which means He cares. In this case they are meaning God cares and the aim of the club is for the kids to realise that God cares for them. So they pick a theme each month and have stories/dramas, games and discussions to help them decide for themselves what they believe as they learn about God. It think they usually just meet the week before to organise it, to me it seemed very African, where the meeting went on for quite a while and at the end I was wondering what had actually been decided! I then realised that I was signed up for thinking of a craft that can be done for each age group keeping in mind the theme for this month is Job! So yeah, hopefully it’ll all work out ok on Thursday! They do it every month, so I assume it’s slightly more organised than it seems!!

Physio wise we’ve been continuing with mobilising a few fracture patients using crutches and walking frames, playing with the malnourished kids and we’ve managed to get our burns patients walking a bit, weight bearing on each leg and even squatting down, so they are progressing well. However they definitely don’t get as much painkillers here as they would at home and sometimes it’s just awful to hear them crying out in pain. But the people here do have a much higher pain threshold and I think culturally they are expected to just get on with it and I suppose painkillers are pretty expensive too.

A lot of people do travel quite far to get here for treatment. We had a lady come in the other day carrying her 12 year old daughter on her back. Apparently she was born healthy and grew well and was walking and talking until the age of 4 when she came down with a flu and fever. They then realised she had epilepsy and by the time she was 6 she no longer talked and by age 8 she could no longer walk. But they had never actually visited the hospital until now! From what I could gather I think she had come a long way, so maybe that had something to do with it. From assessing her she appeared to be malnourished and the physio diagnosed some form of Cerebral Palsy. She could only really lie on her back, unable to sit independently. I just couldn’t believe that she hadn’t been seen for the past 8 years since she was first unwell. I think this kind of thing can be quite common though, and if people don’t come for help, you have no idea that they need it.

I met one of the health workers who does community visits this week, so I’ve arranged to head out with him on Tuesday to go and see what the health care is like in the community. It should be really interesting to see even more rural areas than we already are and to see what work is being done. I’ve heard from Sarah and quite a few of the medical students about clinics which run under mango trees, using the branches to hang babies off of to weigh them etc, so certainly sounds like you certainly have to be thinking outside of the box anyway!

It’s not been too busy this week patient wise, but on Friday female ward was extremely busy when we went to see one of our patients in the afternoon .Unfortunately it turns out that a bus full of school girls had came in after their bus had been turned upside down in an accident. I think about 20 were admitted and 10 were operated on during the day, so I there are plenty fracture patients for us to see next week. It was all a bit hectic on Friday with lots of people everywhere, but we’ll find out more about the situation on Monday morning.