After a few crazy days of travel, we're starting to settle into a bit of a daily routine again - wake up at 5, go kick a rooster, get ready for the hospital, go to chapel, then head to the daily doctor's meeting and student presentation.
Once this was over, we went in search of the previously elusive Mr Mushi. Mr Mushi is the hospital patron, although I assume this doesn't mean he's a saint. He is pretty cool though. He helps look after the students and gave us our timetable for the placement, which is good because we've had no idea what we're supposed to be doing until now. In summary, Mr Mushi was a delight. His deep soothing voice could tame the fiercest of lions. If our jet lag does not improve, we may end up having to invite him over to dinner to read us bedtime stories to help us sleep. He is basically Mufusa in human form.
We then decided to spend today in the hospital's HIV clinic, largely because Mr Mushi recommended it. This is perhaps the single biggest health problem affecting Tanzania, with estimates of 6% of the population being infected with the virus. So unsurprisingly, the clinic was super busy with about a hundred patients to be seen by just two doctors. We sat in with a daktari (doctor) from Germany, who was stereotypically really efficient (unlike most of the Tanzanians we've met, who generally treat the concept of time as a bit of an inconvenience).
Until now, our trip has been all fun and games, but spending time with these HIV patients was a particularly sobering experience. We were fortunate enough to see a great variety of presentations, ranging from the well-controlled, to one girl who was only our age but with a CD4 count of 38 and basically dying. Sadly, we saw lots of children there as well. By far the most confronting case we have seen was that of a two year old infected baby boy. The baby's mother had already died from AIDS and the grandmother had brought him in today because she wanted an injection to kill the baby because he had become so sick. He had already lost 30% of his 10 kilo body weight in only the last month and cried and cried the whole time we saw him. This puts our own lives in perspective, as our biggest problem at the moment is not being able to find any Internet to email home.
The one good thing about the HIV epidemic is that the government provides anti-retrovirals free of charge, which really surprised us. Unfortunately, there is a general reluctance to seek treatment when asymptotic and there is still a large stigma associated with being HIV-positive. So many obstacles remain to prevent infected people from getting treated. This is particularly unfortunate considering how effective these drugs can be - for example, vertical transmission from mother to baby is usually 40%, but goes down to 6% with treatment during pregnancy and 6 months of breastfeeding.
The other big problem that the hospital faces in general is limited options for investigations. HIV viral loads are not possible to do at all. Other things we noticed being done included ordering a chest x-ray as the only way to diagnose heart failure, or not being able to order an albumin to determine liver function in an oedematous patient.
After this quite depressing morning, we went in search of some food. The hospital cafeteria is amazing! We got a fully cooked meal for US$1. It was rice and some miscellaneous meat (the menu is in Swahili) with some spinach (which has hopefully helped with our constipation). Plus, they gave us complementary locally-grown bananas! Win.
Apart from the bargain price for lunch, the other really cool thing about the money over here is the outrageous-sounding sums of cash that we are casually carrying around, like the 50,000 shillings I've got on me at the moment. I feel so loaded! Unfortunately, this only works out to be about $30 though :(
I'm also staring to acclimatise to the weather in Machame, despite daily sweating out my body weight in fluid. It is much cooler up here than Moshi or the airport, which are about 700-800 metres lower down. And it rained today too, although being in a rainforest I guess that's not particularly surprising. The countryside is so lush and green, it's really quite picturesque. There are lots of tropical trees about the place, like bananas, mangoes and pineapples. We've eaten a lot of the local produce and it's pretty tasty!
The biggest drawback to life here is trying to avoid catching malaria. Sleeping with mosquito nets is a massive pain; I almost die on a daily basis trying to get into my top bunk through the stupid net. And putting on the repellent so frequently is unpleasant. One good thing is that being about 2000 metre above sea level, there aren't too many mozzies up here, so we might just be okay!
Happy birthday to Matthew back in Adelaide!
Cheers,
Michael
Things that went wrong: Day 3 edition
- After spending a three hour round trip yesterday for the sole purpose of finding a computer with Internet so we could let the world know we're still alive, we then spent the majority of the afternoon and then evening today trying to get the hospital Internet working. When we did, we spent two hours to send about two emails because it was incredibly slow (1kb per minute) and kept dropping out. I feel like I've been robbed of the best years of my life. There will be no emailing tomorrow.
- After two nights taking advantage of Swedish hospitality, we decided it was time to branch out and cook for ourselves. This resulted in the genesis of the single most disgusting thing I have ever tasted; a creation that makes even Frankenstein's monster look sexy. As anyone who is familiar with Justin and my previous cooking exploits, it is unsurprising that the dish is heavily tomato based. Unfortunately though, the rice we bought from one of the locals came with bonus tree bark and dirt, which certainly didn't add to the texture or flavour. We are looking into going to the cafeteria for dinner tomorrow...
Picture: Our room.
No comments:
Post a Comment