14th February 2012

I’m pleased to say that I am getting back to my project with great speed. Today I drove to Homa health centre (about 1 ½ hours away) where I saw 32 women for their risk assessments. I worked with Lensa, the clinical nurse there and two other visitors came along to see what it was like in the health centre. We were exhausted by the end of the day as we didn’t get to stop for any food until 3pm. Thankfully, Lensa had prepared some food in her house for us and so we gulped that down before returning to Gimbie in the car with one pregnant woman who ruptured her membranes 7 days ago and her mother. She has now been safely deposited into Jeremy’s care, where she was started on a drip to induce her. Interestingly, around 15% of the women that I see are at ‘high risk’ and require a hospital delivery. Today, there were 2 breeches, 2 ruptured membranes and one woman who unbeknown to her, was carrying twins. She wasn’t too happy about this as she already had 4 children but she was at least relieved to hear that they appeared to be well on the scan. Oh and one woman went into labour with her first child and so was delivering her baby as we left the health centre.

 The 'Waiting room'

Tomorrow I am going to a health post, which will be even more rural than the health centre. I tend to find the women to be shorter in height and to have had far fewer antenatal care visits. So that should be interesting.

We have some Maternity Worldwide visitors from the UK arriving tomorrow and we are hosting them ie giving them supper, taking them out to health centres etc etc. So Makabe is busy organising the meals for them. We have decided to make a root vegetable frittata from the Hugh Fernley Whittingstall vegetarian cook book that my parents sent over. Unfortunately, the only root vegetables Makabe could find were carrots, potatoes and sweet potatoes but I’m sure it’ll be very tasty anyway. We also had to buy the eggs as the chickens have been laying our eggs in next door’s bed. I was so embarrassed when he came to bring the eggs to us that I said he could keep the eggs – it was the least that I could do!