February 8th


This morning the girls decided to go ahead and eat with us. Tom made
pancakes, they were really good. After we finished eating, Emily, Laura
and I all headed down to the hospital. This morning I rounded on the
women’s ward and then men’s ward with Laura. It was quite a good
experience. She’s going to be a good doctor and it also helped me get
a little more input into the situations. The morning went pretty smoothly
I think. Not too bad overall. I had to leave before we finished rounding on
men’s ward to go get ready for school and to grab something to eat. While
I was going to the restroom I noticed in the mirror that they had missed
some hair around the crown of my skull, and it was sticking straight up…
So I took the clippers and trimmed it down myself. It wasn’t very hard, I
could probably give myself a haircut if I cared to try, which I don’t mind you.
School was again not too exciting. With the SS 3s I did some practical stuff,
identifying chemicals by the way they react to other chemicals, doing serial
dilutions and a couple other things. Then I had the SS 2s for biology. I gave
them their test and then just finished out the period teaching. When I got
back home Tom wasn’t here. So I headed down to the hospital and found
Tom there with Laura and Emily finishing up the clinic. After they finished
up there we headed over to the wards and found things weren’t quite all in
order. So we spent (we being they with me watching) a little over an hour
sorting things out. By the time it was all done with and everything was
sorted out we had set up a patient with meds that desperately needed
them but didn’t have them (the surgery case I observed on the 6th),
ordered some tests on a man likely to die very soon (we don’t know what
he has and they suspect that even if we figure it out his chances aren’t good,
another case of waiting too long) and a little girl with meningitis was gone,
taken home by her parent’s and is pretty much guaranteed to die now. We
have no idea why they left. They were just simply gone. So it was overall
not a very good evening. We all headed down to Pa Kanu’s for a soft drink.
I love Fanta, I was never partial to it at home but it’s such a wonderful
treat here that I think it’s amazing. After that we headed home, prepared
dinner and waited for Karen to arrive. It was nice to see her again (and of
course regain access to the internet, haha). After dinner I went down to
the hospital with the medical students to check on two cases and make
sure they were doing as well as possible, things were ok so we headed back
up and that puts me here, so with that I’ll wrap this up. Have a great evening.

Blessings from Kamakwie,
Ryan Brooks