Typical Days

Tuesday we had a CHE community outreach. This meant that the CHE's split up into teams of 4 and go around to houses in certain areas and talk about community health topics. My group of 4 was Joseph, both Jenifers, and Denis. After our first house that we went to (where the guy had 2 wives and 10 children), we split off into two groups of two. Jenifer was talking about oral health and Joseph was talking about TB. So we went to 3 more households (1 of them was a "hotel", which is really more like a restaurant. They lectured them about the sanitation there particularly, since there were a ton of flies inside and clearly that is not good for business!). It makes me wonder how much business these "restaurants" actually do - I mean, most of the people here can't really afford to eat meat even, they can barely afford to feed themselves and all their kids, let alone go out to eat.

The third home we went to, they had a kid who had some mental problems/learning difficulties. They only had three kids though, so I think some form of family planning may have been going on (at least, that is my hope).

After we were done - at a certain time they just decided we were done, I guess everyone else knew we were done too, because on our way down the mountain, we ran into other CHE's along the path - we went to Agnes' house (one of the CHE's) for lunch. She had made a crazy amount of posho, along with beans, and meat. It was a typical Ugandan affair, with lots of speeches and going around and introducing ourselves (even though by now, obviously everyone knows each other!), and a prayer before our meal. Patrick (one of the outreach coordinators, who helped train the CHE's) was asking about how we as volunteers can help get people WaterGuard (tablets that you drop in the water to clean it for drinking without having to spend time boiling it and waiting for it to cool) and mosquito nets - so it looks like I'll have to do some fundraising and stuff when I get back - so be prepared to be hit up for donations!

The rest of the afternoon, I went over my language project stuff (actually just finished it up today for the most part), and half-napped a bit, since I was super beat from being out in the sun. Last night's sunset was pretty spectacular, and Mary and I were both taking pictures:



Today was more of a project day than a clinic day for all of us. The girls were working on a game for the kids for the next school outreach on Monday, and I started off my morning by logging all of the grain sacks. They use grain sacks here to make posters on for all of our outreach and also for the PEP's (Patient Education Program - they give lectures and talks to the patients while they wait, taking every opportunity to educate people in the village about sanitation and basic health issues). There is a list of all the grain sacks we should have (basically all the ones they have at the FIMRC clinic, Dr. Lisa's old site), and of course we are missing a lot, so that will probably be a project for me in April.

Once I finished with the grain sacks, I set about putting all the language terms from the manuals I've been going through into one summary list so that when volunteers arrive they can have a list of useful terms - as of right now its about 5 pages, so I probably need to cut that down a bit. I spent most of the afternoon planning my curriculum for the Girls' Community Health Group. Since I obviously won't be here forever, I'm planning out a yearlong curriculum for the CHE's who will be leading the group to follow, so that they can just continue what we're working on and know what they need to do. I'll need to make some grain sacks for visuals for some of the talks, and prepare some materials in advance for the activities. My plan is to do two meetings a month (Girls' Group meets on Saturdays), and have one of them be a lecture (slash discussion) and the other will be an activity day (where they do a game, role play, or other more "fun" project where they still learn!). I'm using information from a camp for girls that Peace Corps did as well as our Maternal Child Health (MHC) curriculum and our Primary Health Education (PHE) curriculum (which is what we work off of for the school outreaches with the CHE's). So my projects are all going pretty well.

This afternoon, we had a clinician meeting, and then the girls went over physical exams with the three clinicians (Sam - primarily station 2, Irene - our midwife, and Andrew - station 3). I got to be the patients. They went over heart and lung exam, abdominal, and neurological. It was kind of staggering how little the clinicians knew about all of these things, considering that most of what we went over I already knew and I haven't been to medical school yet, and these are fully trained Ugandan clinicians! Wow. Now we are just sitting on our back porch (of course the power just went out after being on all day - it makes no sense to me why it goes out at night, other than that whole Murphy's Law thing). I took some pictures tonight... here is Doug and Lisa and their "family" - two cats, Kaiya the dog, and the family of dogs they have recently adopted (they're already dewormed, and will be vaccinated fully on Friday):



And tonight's sunset:



Uhhhmazing. Tomorrow I think will be more project time and likely some shadowing (Lisa has also assigned me an article about international health NGOs that I'll be presenting, the girls have presentations they have to do for their residency, and she thought this would be good for me to do too, so I'll likely also be doing some reading over the next few days before I present!). Then Friday morning we are going to Mbale to go to CURE (more on this later), and a hospice that we were supposed to go to last Wednesday when we were in Mbale but didn't have enough time to go to. Then we'll head to Jinja for a weekend of rafting (and for me, bungee jumping!) in the afternoon. w00t. Pics to follow.

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