I’ve had an exhausting week. Sunday saw the arrival of the
17 bike riders, who despite a few illness along the way, all managed to arrive
in Gimbie in one piece in time to go to the reception that we had arranged in
Green Bar B.
Having heard that there were fanjis in ‘town’ there was a
queue of people to see the ‘doctor’ the next morning. Well, as it turns out,
there aren’t any doctors here but instead an Ethiopian nurse who has been here
for 18 years and is probably a little jaded and now a fresh out of school nurse
who has virtually no experience in symptom recognition and diagnosis. So,
although I also don’t have the skills of a General Practitioner, I thought it
would be helpful for me to work with them. It was certainly an interesting
experience, although not reassuring to see a young man complaining of
headaches, neck stiffness and a dry cough being diagnosed as having pneumonia.
He wasn’t examined in any way, let alone having his chest listened to. I
couldn’t help but intervene – even I would raise an eye at headache and neck
stiffness – and decided to use the clinic as a teaching/learning experience. I
was relieved to see 3 pregnant women as this, at least, is something I now know
quite a bit about.
A game of Bingo on the veranda
Monday I went to a health post in Ganji, where I saw 32
pregnant women for a risk assessment and Tuesday I went to Homa health centre,
where I saw 49 women for risk assessment. Homa has a set of weighing scales
where I always weigh myself and was a little concerned to see I am now just
52Kg so now I am treating myself to regular rations of chocolate.
So why are things in the clinics getting so busy all of a
sudden? Well, I think that word of the risk assessment clinics has reached
women living out in the more remote areas. The women that are now coming for
antenatal care live in many different villages, often far away from the health
centre. This is, of course, excellent news as these are the very women that we
need to reach, as they have often never seen a health professional throughout
their pregnancy. Interestingly, they tend to have had more children than women
who live nearer to the health centres, with some women having 8 or 9 children
and now onto their 10th. Thankfully, there aren’t too many of them.
In fact, when I first came here I was quite surprised at how much women were
planning their families as many chose to have just 2 or 3 children, despite the
fact that it is not unusual for one or more to die before the age of 5 years.
The little boy that I mentioned last week – the one that was
abandoned by the family when the baby’s 15 year old mother died – is still in
the hospital, although we have prompted the hospital to start the process of
getting him to the orphanage, where he will hopefully be adopted by a loving
American couple. He is certainly better off in the orphanage at the moment as
he is currently being deprived of adequate supplies of milk. Yes, the same
problem arises again; the nurses don’t think about sorting out the nutritional
needs for the baby but instead they give a large shrug and mutter ‘no milk’
when asked why the baby hasn’t been fed. The frustration of it all is deeper
than you can imagine. The trouble is it is so difficult to understand why
people don’t have the motivation or inclination to resolve problems. There is a
clear problem; a baby needs milk and doesn’t have any family to buy the milk.
It turns out that the hospital will provide the milk BUT for some curious
reason they need to be informed of the situation. Now you might think this is obvious but here, this is far from obvious
to many people. So the baby doesn’t get the milk until some faranj buys it.
However, now that we have managed to work out what the hospital policy is –
something you might think the nurses would already know – we can make sure that
they inform the admin staff when a baby needs some milk. Do I believe that they
will do this next time? What do you think? Am I becoming just a little cynical?
Wednesday I went to an incredibly remote place called the
Green Lake clinic to look at the facilities there and help with an assessment
of these. The clinic is set in the middle of a large flat plain (unusual for
Ethiopia) with the nearest town being 3 ½ hours walk away. The clinic doesn’t
have any running water or electricity, although this was something that the
people I went with were looking to resolve. Being so remote, there is little
food available and so we ate injera and lentils for each meal. I drew the line
on the sieved bean soup for breakfast though, deciding that 3 cups of tea would
be just fine – I brought my own teabags. At night, we made a camp-fire and
since we were still hungry, we were very grateful for the bag of Bombay mix
that I had brought along.
Typically untidy clinical area at the health centre
An unsuccessful health education message
My bed for the night
The faranjis arrive at Green Lake
I returned from the clinic on Thursday evening totally
shattered. I woke in the night, however, feeling something crawling in my hair
– it felt like a mouse or something like that but we couldn’t find any evidence
of it. So now I am wondering whether I imagined it – perhaps I am becoming
psychologically disturbed by the bugs and the fact that we seem to have at
least 2 resident rodents. Jeremy placed a piece of orange matchmaker chocolate
on two traps that Makabe bought but these don’t seem to work as the chocolate
went and the trap didn’t go off. Actually, I was quite pleased about this as I
didn’t fancy coming down to a dead creature in the morning. Mind you, I also don’t
fancy it being in the bed either. Anyway, as part of my ‘therapy’ I am
collecting a photographic portfolio of the bugs and animals that live in the
house. I will post it on the blog when complete.
Last night, we were settling down for a nice bowl of baked
pumpkin, potato and tomato, made hugely better by the grated mature chedder
sprinkled on the top (good idea to bring the waxed chedders from Christmas
Sue), when I thought a nice glass of chilled white wine would set the whole
meal off to a treat. I was a little concerned to find that the wine had
disappeared form the fridge, and even more alarmed when it occurred to me that
Makabe must have done something with it – the thought running through my mind
was ‘perhaps she thought it was water and has used it to make up Jaba’s milk’.
Makabe uses the water that we boil and filter in the house for Jaba’s feeds and
so it isn’t beyond the realms of possibilities that she could have taken the
wine, cleverly decanted into a water bottle so it could be chilled, by mistake.
Once she came round from her sleepy state (it was only 9.30pm but people go to
bed early here), we managed to sort out that she had thought it was tap water
that she had chilled when she had a headache and she didn’t want us to drink it
as it hadn’t been boiled so she tipped it down the sink. Now this may seem
trivial to those of you who have easy access to supplies of wine but we have to
buy ours from Addis and we are running very low! Oh well, another enforced
health improvement comes our way.
Connect four championship
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