Emu, Biri, Satu, Nnya... (1,2,3,4...)

Week 4 already!

I’m not managing too well with the whole trying to learn Luganda, it’s difficult to pronounce the words right and I’m pretty forgetful as well, but counting is something I’m getting more confident at since we often get the patients to count as we do stretches and the younger ones like to count when they’re playing!

So it’s been a good week so far. It turned out that Monday wasn’t as busy as I was expecting at all. Most of the girls who had been admitted with the bus crash seemed to have been discharged at the weekend. Apparently most of them weren’t harmed too badly, just cuts and grazes and I think a few were transferred to hospitals nearer to where they live.

Tuesday was busy! We treated a few of our patients on the ward, then at half 11 I headed off to find the community health worker that I had arranged to join on his visits. So we headed off on his motorbike to visit various patients where they live around Kiwoko and in nearby villages just before 12. It was really good to see patients in their own homes and to get more of an idea of how they actually live.
We saw 11 patients altogether, most of them with some kind of physical disability. The community team are very busy with all they do and it was good to see they difference they have made. They do a lot of education about hygiene and safe drinking water etc and they try to think how they can help the patients to make their everyday living easier. One device they have come up with for people without running water is a wooden frame with two jerry cans attached for hand washing. The person presses a wooden leaver with their foot which then turns a bottle of soapy water downwards to wash their hands and then they do the same for a bottle without soap to rinse them. I saw this contraption at a few houses, so it’s good to see it’s being used. The community health workers are very good at thinking ‘outside the box’ as we’d say as they try to come up with ways to help people who either struggle to walk or carry out everyday tasks. When a patient is unable to walk independently, they often provide them with a suitable walking aid and for a few of the patients we visited they had built special toilets for them as they would normally have to squat, which can prove very difficult with one leg or if your leg muscles are very weak. For one of the patients we saw, they had made him some parallel bars out of wood so that he could practice standing and so he is able to spend some time out of his wheelchair (a plastic garden seat on wheels!). For some of them it was limited what they could do depending on the patient’s condition or sometimes they didn’t have enough money for equipment, although they do try to build with local materials to keep costs down. We saw a guy who was 19 and he had his own way of moving around by shuffling around on his bottom, so they just let him do that so he can at least move independently as he couldn’t use any walking aid because of his arms and he didn’t like the restriction of being in a wheelchair. He seemed to have a reasonable quality of life living with his family (alot of people live in their extended families) and he seemed very happy, so they check up on him every month or so.

We also visited the baby boy that we put plaster cast on his feet a few weeks ago to treat Club foot in the physio dept. So it was lovely to see him at home. I would say his feet aren’t really normal but they do look better than they did when we first saw him. They’ve now decided to get him to wear shoes on the wrong feet to help correct the positioning of his feet, but when we arrived we noticed he wasn’t actually wearing the shoes. (One of his siblings picked him up and took him inside when we arrived, then he reappeared with the shoes on!) So I think the health worker tried to tell them of the importance of wearing them, but I’m not sure if they will actually get him to wear them or not.

There’s so much more to say about the community visits, but I’ll maybe try and upload a couple of the photos which might give a better idea of what I saw. By the time I got back at about 3pm Moses had had a busy day with lots of Outpatients being sent our way aswell as the ones on the ward. He had already seen 4 and had another 2 waiting! So I was able to see a patient with back pain and one with knee pain before we both went to see the boy with the burns on his back and leg. I think they are going to have to do skin grafting, but he is improving – he was able to bend over and touch the ground which is a great improvement for him and he was able to hold his leg straight and fully weight bear on it too.

Wednesday we weren’t too busy, we managed to cover most of our patients in the morning and then I was able to read some of the physio books that have been left in the department by the physio that was here from the UK for a few years. We didn’t have any outpatients at all, it seems to be one extreme or the other!

I met up with one of the students that Sarah had introduced me to go to Nursing student’s bible study on Wednesday night.  The leader was very quiet and the discussion never really got going as they seemed to just ask question after question. I’m not sure if it’s just what they are used to learning but the leader just seemed to be quite happy to get the expected/right answer instead of questioning why or how it’s relevant to them or what they could do or change. So I’m not really sure how much anyone got out of it, but hopefully it was encouraging to meet up with other Christians and maybe it will spark some discussions among some of them later.

Then today we had the kids club for kids with HIV. It seemed to go pretty well. It’s all just so much more relaxed than working with children at home! We stuck roughly to our plan time wise, although a lot of it did seem to be a bit last minute!
Once the kids were registered we played lots of games outside which was good fun, they were all so full of energy! Then we had a tea break before starting with the story and puppets. It was pretty much all in Luganda, so I have to say I didn’t understand too much at this point, but they all listened really well. There was a slight change in the plan, so I was given the task of doing an ‘energiser’ (which is just a few minutes of getting them moving around and making noise to keep them awake!) before they did the memory verse and then got into their groups for discussions and crafts. We ended up doing colouring in for the younger group which I was in. One of the other leaders came up with a craft for the ones aged 8-12 which involved them making a little fence out of wooden sticks, decorating it with sheep on it ...and then after they had made them, they had to swap and destroy what each other had made! Apparently the aim was to see how they reacted to loosing something they had made and for them to learn from Job’s example when he lost his flocks! Certainly an interesting idea, I can’t really imagine it working at home! I wasn’t with those groups to see the reactions, but they all seemed very happy when they came back to join us in the room inside! I think they quite enjoyed it all!
They then had a wee quiz, sang a few songs and finished up about 2pm and we managed to get some lunch and see a couple of patients before the end of the day. I think the kids did take in a lot of what they were being taught, so please pray that they will take that away with them and that they might come to know God for themselves and to learn to trust him like Job did even when they don’t know why they are in the circumstances that they find themselves in.

Because we didn’t see all our patients today, we’ll make sure they are all seen tomorrow. We were able to ask the attendants of the ones we didn’t see to help them with exercises and where possible to get them walking outside, so we’ll have to check up if they did or not!