I have done, seen and experienced so much in so little time. The last couple of days have been as busy and exciting as the others. I spent one of the days clearing the store cupboard that belongs to the Basingstoke Hospital charity and Help Hoima which was full of useless or out of date equipment and drugs that people have brought here over the last 7 years. But also held plenty of indispensable items. The amount of orange dust in there was ridiculous and I was covered head to foot when I came out. As a break from the store cupboard I stayed with a woman in labour for a while but didn't actually see her give birth - however the next day she came running to find us to show us her beautiful baby :)
Yesterday was a completely new experience altogether. We went on a trip to a place called Runga which is on the edge of Lake Albert. We set up an antenatal clinic and an HIV screening area. The village was completely secluded from anywhere else and was all mud huts and drop toilets. It was a beautiful place with a spectacular view over the lake - which looked like the sea - and you could just see the Republic of Congo on the other side. The children were all absolutely thrilled to see us and they kept just coming up to us and stroking our skin because they were mesmerized by how white it was. Many of the younger ones wouldn't stop crying because they had never seen a white person before so they were terrified! When we took pictures of them, they loved it and I got swarmed many a time so that they could see themselves on the camera. We set up the clinic in the church which again was made of mud with a corner for observations (temp, BP, heart rate, weight, etc) and then 2 palpitation stations to check the gestation time and approximately when the due date would be (none of them know themselves). And then I was in charge of the log book and 'pharmacy' giving out multivitamins, folic acid, worming tablets and antimalarials. We got through 62 pregnant women in 3 hours and there were some that we didnt have time to check - that's a lotta pregnant people in one village!! I was shocked by how young some of them were - one was only 16, and another was 18 and about to have her second baby - and how many children some of them had had (the most was 8 previous babies). I was also shocked by the number of pregnant women with HIV, some of whom had known already that they were HIV +ve and yet still got pregnant again, but there's not a lot they can do to stop it!
The journey there and back was an experience in itself. It was an orange dirt road the whole way which gradually got thinner and thinner until we were practically driving down a footpath. Just before we got to the village we had to pretty much go down a rock face which had massive ravines in it from water running down and I have never been so bumped around in my life. The journey back was awful too because I hadn't been able to use the cockroach infested, stinking toilets so I hadn't been to the loo for 11 hours so my extremely full bladder felt every single bump ;)
The paediatric team went off on safari in the early hours of this morning so there is just 5 of us left in Hoima. This morning, I went to the local girls secondary school with Heather (Charlie's wife who teaching there) and I had a chat to the head teacher about whether I can help out there at all. We decided that I would do 'computer basics' classes for the equivalent of Year 7, 8 and 11 - however, I later found out that there is just one computer monitor and none of them know anything about computers so that could be interesting. I am also going to join in their PE lessons playing netball and volleyball to burn off some of the large quantity of carbs that I am eating every day.
We took most of the afternoon off having scrubbed down the labour room at Azur clinic (which looked like it had never been cleaned) so I fell asleep by the pool in the sunshine and now we are preparing ourselves for a weekend of relaxation.
Everything will change again on Sunday when I move in with Esau, the director of Azur, and become even more immersed in the African life.
Lots of love to everyone back home xxxxx
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