Now there’s another thing that’s going to hinder the vegetable garden – an entire troop of monkeys were swinging on the veranda this morning, jumping from the veranda beams to the, as yet unidentified, tree in front of the house. I think there is some kind of fruit growing on the tree and so presume this is just a temporary picnic place for them. Talking of food, we saw the ‘chicken man’ this afternoon. I’m not sure whether we have actually managed to negotiate some fresh eggs or not as our Oromo isn’t that good yet and as you might imagine, he didn’t speak any English.
I set off at 7.30 this morning to visit the health centres out in the Kebeles (villages). After a very bumpy 2 hour drive, we arrived at Nole Health office, where there were around 55 community voluntary health workers awaiting a teaching session from the midwife travelling with us. I got the gist of the teaching session, but largely because Silleshi, the midwife, supplemented his teaching with animated gestures. Basically, the health workers were being taught about the various risk factors associated with pregnancy and how to identify these and how to detect post-partum complications such as infection and haemorrhage. The whole session took around 2 hours and encouragingly, there was quite a lot of discussion about their past experiences of delivering babies. One woman spoke of having to deliver triplets in the house, which was quite a surprise to both her and the mother, as she wasn’t expecting this. I’m not sure whether they survived or not though.
After this, I was taken to the health centre in Haru, which has recently received some new equipment – some of which was provided by MW. The team there were really friendly and happy to chat to me about what they were doing. Amazingly, just 2 weeks ago they set up a new system of medical record keeping for all people attending the health centre. This is fantastic news as I was wondering exactly how I was going to be following women up after the deliveries. Hopefully, they will keep the records up-to-date and will also then appreciate the benefit of having them. I am looking forward to going back to this place as I think the staff there are very receptive to any support that they can get.
On our way back to Gimbie, we picked up a pregnant woman who had been teaching at the village school and was now along her 3km walk back home.
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