So Long Justin...

Woke up this morning for breakfast, then Frederick took Justin and I into Moshi. We dropped Justin off at the bus stand so he could catch his bus into Dar. It was a kind of sad moment, because we had been together now for almost 2 months. Our travels were coming to a close and the scary part was our lives were about to begin - his once he got back to Meredith's village and mine once I got back to the US. When we arrived at the bus stop it became a surreal moment, and it was kind of like we both knew this moment would come but had hoped it wouldn't.

After dropping Justin off, Frederick and I left for the clinic where I would be working over the next week and a half. I was going to be working at the Shirimatunda Dispensary clinic in an outlying village. Frederick introduced me to the doctor and the staff at the clinic and then quickly headed out to go tend to other volunteers. I stayed with the doctor the entire day, watching him tend to patients. As he saw each patient, he would usually talk to the patient awhile in Swahili and then turn and tell me what was going on in English so that I could keep up with what was going on. Towards the end of the day, he didn't do this near as much, which was fine because half the time I knew what the diagnosis was going to be anyway. Probably 75% of the people we saw today had malaria, which was alarmingly high I thought. I would have expected that in the hot, wet environments of Dar and the coast, but not so much in the colder, mountain regions of Moshi. I got to help out some by listening to patients lung sounds or taking their blood pressure. For the most part the adults were fine with me being in there. The children on the other hand were always scared to death of me! A few times the doctor asked me to listen to the lung sounds of small kids, and you could almost be certain that as I approached them with the stethoscope they would burst into tears and start screaming. As long as I maintained an appropriate distance they could withstand this reaction, but as soon as I started to get close to them it was no holding back!

The clinic was very busy! I arrived at around 9am and the doctor saw patients non-stop till almost 3pm. I would guess that we saw around 50 people that day!

I learned that kids under the age of 5 with malaria get free medical treatment, but everyone else had to pay 500 shillings. This actually isn't much, considering you can buy a large bottle of water or couple pieces of fruit for about 500 shillings. I would therefore assume that this isn't relatively expensive for the average Tanzanian, but then again I really have no way of knowing for sure. Also, treatment of STIs or sexually transmitted infections is free for all ages. The doctor told me that this is to encourage people to seek treatment and basically all he does is take down some information in a separate log book which is for the government, and then the government foots the bill. The doctor also gives the medicine to the patient directly in his office to ensure patient privacy, which I thought was pretty interesting.

After work was over, I went out an talked to one of the nurses, Helen, while I waited on Frederick to pick me up. She was nice, and said she would teach me a few words of Swahili everyday. We talked about swine flu, which she said she was very worried about because a case had been reported in Nairobi. That actually is pretty scary for them considering the lack of adequate health resources and health standards, and the greatly diminished immune systems of what seems to be many people who have malaria here in the region.

Frederick, along with some of the volunteers from the orphangee, picked me up from work and we went into town. We went to the internet cafe for a little while, then myself and a few of the other volunteers went downtown as Frederick took some new arrivals back to the volunteer house. We walked around downtown for a little while, then stopped at this bar and talked for awhile till Frederick came to pick us up. He took us over to a place to get our first good sighting of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which was just incredible! It was insane to think people had climbed to the top of that! It definitely made me want to climb to the top of it, but at this point I don't have the time or the money to squeeze it into my trip! Maybe next time! :)

Back at the house, I talked to a guy who was a first year medical student. He was working at the hospital. He said it was pretty interesting. He is basically shadowing and assisting from the sounds of it. He said he was in one surgery and the power went out! So he had to hold a flashlight so the surgery could go on! How crazy is that!