Greetings!
I am truly terrible at updating this blog, so please forgive
me.
The dry season is approaching!
Dragon flies are everywhere- this is a sign that the rainy season is ending. Its also
getting really, really hot here. The sky is clear at night and the moon is so
bright- it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen! I don’t even need a flashlight to
see at night because the moon is so intense!
I’m learning some language of the dialect here (Bangwa). I
love walking into the ward in the morning and asking patients how they slept in
their own language- all the natives get a kick out of it! They really enjoy
when us “white men” speak their language. One of the nurses told me I will have
to teach them how to speak my dialect-when I told him I don’t speak a dialect,
he didn’t believe me! It took me ten minutes to convince him that we don’t have
dialects, and we only speak English in the US (well for the most part).
One thing I learned here is to
never ask to use the bathroom anywhere you go. I was with some friends getting
something to drink one weekend and I had to use the bathroom-there was no
waiting until walking home. So the owner of this fine establishment pointed me
to the back, where I found a wooden stall. I opened the door and found a small
hole in the floor….luxurious!
The roads to Fontem are so bad that
many people are not traveling-which means stores are selling out of things that
they buy from larger villages. Things like flour, carrots, and cabbage are
becoming less common now… I’m realizing how much we take for granted being able
to buy whatever we want, whenever we want at the store! Even the European volunteers here ask me, “is
it true that you have stores open 24 hours a day in America?”… of course we do!
All the volunteers here see how spoiled we really are in our own countries, but
I am truly the most spoiled amongst the spoiled. Americans have everything at
their fingertips, almost every second of every day. We have almost all the
resources we need to do whatever we want. For example, if we want to go to
college or get a master’s degree, we apply for financial aid or student loans
to pay if we cannot afford it. Most of the nurses here won’t earn the amount of
money necessary to go to school to get a master’s degree if they worked their
entire life! And there is no such thing as financial aid or student loans here.
Many of them apply over and over again to master’s programs in the US (any
program- even if it isn’t something they want to do), and pray that they can be
a lucky recipient of a visa so they can go to the US, attend a program they
aren’t even interested in, just to be in America. This experience has really
opened my eyes to the opportunities we are given in the US and it has inspired
me to rethink my goals!
I now work afternoons and overnight
at the hospital, in addition to morning shift (of course not all in one day).
The doctors are only at the hospital during the morning shift so I have to make
a lot of decisions on my own when working in the afternoon or night. I feel
totally unprepared some of the time, but I am doing my best. A lot of the
nursing here involves using your instincts… something I am just beginning to
develop as a new nurse. There is no way for me to assess all of my patients
because at times I can have more than 20 patients so I just have to pick and
choose the most critical ones. And when we do vitals, everything is done
manually- manual blood pressures, pulses, respirations, and the old school
mercury thermometers. Taking vitals can be a real torture but it may be the
only time I speak to some of the patients in my shift so I have to really use
my time wisely!
My ethics class in nursing school
definitely didn’t prepare me for the issues I have faced working in the
hospital here. I am constantly encountering things that I should not be doing,
but that I have to do. For example, when we start an infusion and miss the
vein, you are supposed to throw away the needle and start again or you risk
giving the patient an infection. When we miss a vein here, we can’t get a new
needle because we have to consider whether or not the patient will be able to
pay for it when the bill comes. So we risk giving the patient an infection, or
risk the patient not being able to pay for the bill. If patients consistently
cannot afford to pay their bills, the hospital will suffer the costs and we
risk putting the hospital in a financial bind. If we put the hospital in
jeopardy, how will it be able to afford to care for the hundreds and thousands
of people in the surrounding villages?
We must constantly think about
costs and be extremely mindful of the materials we are using. I am aware that
in reality, you have to change someone’s IV and infusion set tubing every 72
hours, but we only change these when it is absolutely necessary (so, almost
never). It’s almost as if we have to
sacrifice the safety of one patient for the well being of the hospital, but can
you do when you don’t have all the resources you need?
And speaking of infection control- I
found a big crab in the hospital the other day…it walk inside, died, and ants
were eating it- I didn’t even know crabs lived in the bush of Africa! And
that’s not all the wildlife I find inside the hospital… lizards and birds are
always running around inside.
The surgeon of the hospital is
amazing. He does all kinds of surgeries and procedures from c-sections to
colonoscopies to repairing hernias, removing gall bladders and more. He does a
little bit of everything because really he has no other choice! The other day I
was watching him do an upper endoscopy (which was the area that my final
clinical was in)… I was so happy to see something I actually knew about! We
deal with all kinds of diseases that I never learned about in nursing school
because we don’t have them in the US. Typhoid fever, malaria, chickenpox,
measles, and tuberculosis are some of the common reasons for admission, but I
knew very little about these before coming here so I have had a lot of learning
to do!
I went to the government high
school the other day for a club meeting and then to watch sports. Every
Wednesday they have social activities where clubs meet and then they play
sports. I went to the Youth for a United World meeting, which my friend was
leading because she is a teacher in the high school. It was really inspiring to
sit in a classroom completely different from my own, with people from a totally
different culture, on the other side of the world, and to know that we were all
there to live for the same thing- a united world.
Chiara and I have been living on a
serious food budget! We barely made it through October, buying only the
necessities- rice, pasta, potatoes, vegetables, etc., but somehow it just
wasn’t enough money. On Tuesday, we ate the absolute last thing we had for
lunch and dinner: sweet potatoes (that
we received as a gift from someone). Just plain sweet potatoes. It was the kind
of situation where you have to laugh or else you could be seriously upset- so
we laughed. But then we realized that although we had been stressed about food
for a couple weeks, many of our neighbors are living like this every day. And
if we absolutely needed to, we could ask the hospital for more money but the
people that live here have nobody to help them if they can’t afford food. So
after we realized this, we stopped whining and welcomed our short moment of
suffering!
Everybody here eats pepper- African
hot peppers. If a meal isn’t spicy, it isn’t good! So last week at the market,
Chiara and I bought peppers to make a sauce with. These things are nothing to
mess around with. After we ground the pepper, we had to fry it with spices.
Nobody told us how dangerous this could be! Within seconds, the kitchen was
engulfed in this pepper poison and we couldn’t breathe. I had to run out of the
kitchen, my chest burning and coughing. We immediately turned off the stove and
put the pepper away. I made sure to wash the dishes very well, but
unfortunately I contaminated my hands with this pepper when I washed them-they
were burning for the rest of the night! I had to keep going to the kitchen to
put my hands in the freezer because it was that painful! So we are learning
things the hard way, but at least we are learning!
African families are so big! An
average family is 6-9 kids and I have found that families are very close knit.
A nurse-friend of mine at the hospital was telling me about his family: he is
the youngest of six kids. His father died when he was just a baby so all of his
siblings have taken care of each other. The mother put the first child through
school, then the first child had the responsibility of putting the all the
children below him through school. The second oldest made sure everyone below
him was able to afford school. This continued on down until the last child. So
since my friend is the youngest, he has the responsibility of helping all of
his siblings’ children attend school before he can send his own children to
school. It was really moving to see how dedicated families are to helping one
another. Even in the hospital, families never leave their relative! Cousins,
nieces, nephews, aunts, grandchildren…they are all there to visit their sick
patient. One of my friends here was telling me that a man may have no material
possessions, but he can truly say with joy, “I have no materials to call my own, but
look at my ten children!”.
I have been keeping busy after work
and on my days off visiting people, going to schools for sports, and helping
with the Catholic Mission center. A bunch of young children had a retreat last
weekend that I helped out with. They were so much fun! I brought a frisbee that
I received in a box from home and they went wild playing with it! We also
watched Jesus of Nazareth in Pidgin- I don’t know who in the world translated
that movie into Pidgin but it was pretty funny.
I am still enjoying every single day I am
here. It isn’t always easy, but it is always worthwhile!
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