…including watching a cow being butchered, making mashed
“garden egg stew”, being woken up by roosters and accidentally eating a fish
bone that was buried in my dinner.
Well, it’s day four and we already
lost Ashley, one of the four Americans here in Asiumka, to malaria. During our
work day yesterday she got extremely sick and unfortunately for her the tests
came back positive for malaria today. But no worries, after about three days
she should be back to normal.
Working at Our Lady of Grace
Hospital is INSANE. The hospital is huge with many different areas such as
pediatrics, female ward, male ward, dental, eye care, out patient, emergency,
pharmacy, laboratory, x-ray/ultrasound, psychiatric, HIV/AIDS, maternity and OBGYN.
The hospital is set up in different one-story buildings that have anywhere from
10-30 beds squeezed in them. All of the buildings take up about a full city
block and there’s thousands of people sitting/standing and laying everywhere
throughout the hospital grounds. We got our schedules made by the head nurse
manager who has placed me in pediatrics for 4 weeks, surgery for 2 weeks and
the female ward for 2 weeks. Our workdays start at 7 am and end when our
homestay sister is ready to leave since she’s an accountant for the hospital.
So far in the children’s ward I
have done a lot of training and shadowing of the nurses but today I got to do
rounds with the doctor for about 2 hours. There are only 9 doctors in this
entire hospital so they’re literally treated like celebrities. Therefore, I was
very lucky to have made friends with Dr. Donkor Baah and can already tell I’ll
be learning a lot from him. Between
today and yesterday I’ve watched a complete blood transfusion in a newborn baby
with Jaundice, spent some time in the pharmacy, learned how to admit a patient,
and learned how to administer medication through in IV. Most of the nurses and
patients are very nice and willing to help me learn in any way possible. The
hospital itself is extremely old, behind the times and quite unsanitary but I
am lucky enough to work with nurses who pride themselves on wearing gloves and
cleaning anything and everything with alcohol for sterilization.
After work today we went to the
market where our homestay sister Winifred bought us fabric to get African
dresses made by her tailor. We also bought a bunch of food for dinners this
week before heading home and even went to a butcher shop where they hacked up a
cow using a machete right in front of us. Although it was awesome, it’s
definitely something I wouldn’t mind forgetting about. We are very persistent
on wanting to help make dinner instead of constantly being waited on hand and
foot so tonight they let us assist them (pictures below). However, after we
assisted them in making the stew they took it into the kitchen and added fish,
which we have been very clear we don’t like. Needless to say, our dinner that
took 2 hours to make wasn’t consumed by either of us….
Overall, I’m still in awe that I’m
actually here and am truly enjoying every second of it!
p.s HAPPY 21ST BIRTHDAY LISA! LOVE YOU!
p.s.s. I can't post any pictures yet because our internet is too weak!
No comments:
Post a Comment