Monday 31 October 2011

29th October

Yesterday, I went to two more health centres to set up my obstetric risk screening project – This went well as there were a couple of pregnant women at the centre and so I was able to show the head of the district health office how useful the portable ultrasound could be. Indeed, he wants me to go out with the Health Extension Workers when they do the outreach clinics, which is exactly what I need to be doing so all in all it was a very useful day. We stopped off at a darkened room for lunch, where I was ordered chilli scrambled egg with injera (the grey coloured pancake that has the texture of a wet flannel) and bread. They had to run to another place to get the bread as this isn’t something that Ethiopians have for lunch. Mind you, they don’t have eggs either but since there are always chickens running around every household I guess this wasn’t such a problem.

 Lunch place

After lunch we were taken to the health centre that had dealt with the breech presentation pregnancy a few nights ago. It turns out that having induced her, they realised that they were not going to be able to deliver the baby as it was breech and so told her to make her way to the hospital. This she did having waited 4 hours for a bus to take her on the 2-hour journey to the hospital. The head of the district health office was not impressed with what had gone on and is going to set up a meeting with the nurses to discuss the case further.

Stretcher, otherwise known as a 'foot ambulance' or the helicopter, used to bring women to hospital or health centre 

Having checked up on baby Jaba (I have named him this as it means ‘fighter/strength and he is going to need a lot more of this), who is now absorbing his feeds fairly well, we set up for what has become ‘Friday film night’. We invite the 3 other expats and Ethiopians that we work with to come to our house for popcorn, pizza and soup and we show a film from the collection that we have on our external hard drive. We are able to project it onto a wall and the picture is really pretty good. So far, the film night has gone down well, although I’m not sure that all the Ethiopians always get the gist of the story. Still, the pizza, despite having just a scraping of cheese on top, is very nice.

 Baby Jaba

We were given 3 hens yesterday and were told that one had started laying and the other two should do so fairly soon. So you might imagine my surprise when there was a distinct cock a doodle doo coming out of the chicken house as the young, allegedly laying ‘hen’ was trying to communicate to other cockerels in the neighbourhood. Needless to say, he has got to go. It’s bad enough having the orthodox priest wake us up every morning without having to listen to a rooster as well. Jeremy seems to have been plotting with a Danish couple here to prepare a meal of Coq au vin for tomorrow but I’m not so sure about this. It is very possible, therefore, that he has just had the last supper!

2 comments:

  1. Alison Nightingale31 October 2011 at 22:56

    Fab photos Karen! Thanks for posting those as it's difficult to imagine your surroundings. Baby Jaba looks surprisingly good for such a premature baby, it seems you have magic hands! I'm surprised House didn't feature on film night - two episodes in a row could count as a film!! There's time yet I'm sure.... Xx

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  2. Lovely to get your comments Alsion - glad the blogs are interesting. Is there a new series of House out?? I shall be buying this when I get back to the UK.
    xxx

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