11th March 2012

As has become the routine now, we had Jaba for the day yesterday. He’s doing well – feeding like it was his last bottle of milk and putting on plenty of weight. I couldn’t help noticing that he had a few bed bug bites on his head but I guess that’s par for the course here. I sympathise with him.

 A couple of days ago, a woman came to the clinic to see Jeremy. When asked what the problem was she replied; “the faranji came to Ganji and told me I have to come to the hospital to have my baby”. I think this should be the title of a song! I did indeed see her in Ganji (a village that is about 2 hours drive away) and since she was pregnant with twins, had one stillbirth before and was 145cm high, I told her very firmly that she must have these babies in the hospital. So seems she was listening. She will have a caesarean section today so I hope all goes well for her.

Update on the baby with spina bifida; she had the hole in her back closed the day before yesterday and is doing really well. This is really very good news as I was pretty sure that she would have to go to Addis to have her surgery and it was very unlikely that the family would be able to afford this and so her future was not looking great. Thankfully, there is a surgeon from Addis here for a month and he was happy to do the operation here, despite having limited facilities, not least of all very basic anaesthetic drugs.

Update on rodent presence in the house; two small ‘mice’ with fluffy tails have taken a nosedive into the washing up bowl, which, since they clearly couldn’t swim, ended in their demise. Thank goodness Makabe found them and dealt with it.