…including watching a cow being butchered, making mashed “garden egg stew”, being woken up by roosters and accidentally eating a fish bone that was buried in my dinner.
Well, it’s day four and we already lost Ashley, one of the four Americans here in Asiumka, to malaria. During our work day yesterday she got extremely sick and unfortunately for her the tests came back positive for malaria today. But no worries, after about three days she should be back to normal.
Working at Our Lady of Grace Hospital is INSANE. The hospital is huge with many different areas such as pediatrics, female ward, male ward, dental, eye care, out patient, emergency, pharmacy, laboratory, x-ray/ultrasound, psychiatric, HIV/AIDS, maternity and OBGYN. The hospital is set up in different one-story buildings that have anywhere from 10-30 beds squeezed in them. All of the buildings take up about a full city block and there’s thousands of people sitting/standing and laying everywhere throughout the hospital grounds. We got our schedules made by the head nurse manager who has placed me in pediatrics for 4 weeks, surgery for 2 weeks and the female ward for 2 weeks. Our workdays start at 7 am and end when our homestay sister is ready to leave since she’s an accountant for the hospital.
So far in the children’s ward I have done a lot of training and shadowing of the nurses but today I got to do rounds with the doctor for about 2 hours. There are only 9 doctors in this entire hospital so they’re literally treated like celebrities. Therefore, I was very lucky to have made friends with Dr. Donkor Baah and can already tell I’ll be learning a lot from him. Between today and yesterday I’ve watched a complete blood transfusion in a newborn baby with Jaundice, spent some time in the pharmacy, learned how to admit a patient, and learned how to administer medication through in IV. Most of the nurses and patients are very nice and willing to help me learn in any way possible. The hospital itself is extremely old, behind the times and quite unsanitary but I am lucky enough to work with nurses who pride themselves on wearing gloves and cleaning anything and everything with alcohol for sterilization.
After work today we went to the market where our homestay sister Winifred bought us fabric to get African dresses made by her tailor. We also bought a bunch of food for dinners this week before heading home and even went to a butcher shop where they hacked up a cow using a machete right in front of us. Although it was awesome, it’s definitely something I wouldn’t mind forgetting about. We are very persistent on wanting to help make dinner instead of constantly being waited on hand and foot so tonight they let us assist them. However, after we assisted them in making the stew they took it into the kitchen and added fish, which we have been very clear we don’t like. Needless to say, our dinner that took 2 hours to make wasn’t consumed by either of us….
Overall, I’m still in awe that I’m actually here and am truly enjoying every second of it!
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