Week 2: Mawenzi hospital

Habari asubuhi (good morning) -

Word of the week: sowa (okay-Dr. Ruga says this about every third word)

Our week with Dr. Ruga has come to an end. While we have not done a ton, we have definitely experienced alot. We have probably heard more screaming this week than we have in the rest of our lives. Not to paint a dreadful picture, but in a hospital where painkillers are not handed out freely and doctors/ nurses may not be the most tender handed, it can be pretty loud. Most of the screaming comes from the smaller children when gauze is being removed/applied to their burns or their broken legs are being set old-school style (we will explain in a minute). Our daily routine consists of arriving at 8:00 and attending an early meeting with all the staff to discuss special cases or any problems that occured overnight. The meeting room is a converted classroom with chalkboard and wooden chairs. After this, we head over to Dr. Ruga's ward to make the morning round. Sometimes we helped folding the gauze that would be later used for the burn victims. Charts for the patients consist of a brown folder with any scrap paper available to write down vitals, treatments, and the like. On Thursday, we attended a surgical clinic where Dr. Ruga saw roughly 30 patients in 2 hours. We saw several interesting cases but we were not able to understand Dr. Ruga's explanation half of the time because he speaks in very accented, mumbled Enlglish. ( eg. Calcium= cowshum). Today, during rounds we were a little more active and able to assist in the setting of a girl's broken femur. The fracture was very severe, completely broken. Since the girl was too large for the previously referred 'slaughter house traction,' they had to set her leg using weights ( or i should say rocks). First, we taped along each side of her leg with tape and attached a wooden square to her foot that would hold the weight. During this process, the girl nearly shattered every window (oh wait there are no windows) with her screams. At one point, Dr. Ruga got pissed at her lack of compliance and proceeded to smack her across the leg (thankfully the non-broken one). They are not evil people but in general, the doctors and nurses seem to have less sympathy for pain tolerance.
We then weighed the girl in order to determine the traction weight (10%) of the rocks to be attached to the end of her foot via pulley. Anyways, things have been interesting (in a good way) and next week we are looking forward to a new adventure.
Last night, we had another good experience with the locals. After completing our daily run, we saw some children playing soccer and feeling only slightly intimidated, we asked if we could play. We kicked around the ball ( compilation of grocery bags with rubber bands attached) for a little while, and then decided to bring out our hacky-sak (we had been practicing). We proceeded to get schooled by an eight year-old boy, who is better at soccer now than we can ever be. One of the boys who we played football with joined us, and we played a game of (every man for himself) soccer.
We are going to Arusha tomorrow and we promise to take many pictures and post them on Monday.
Hope everyone is doing well.
kwaheri,
Andy and Ryan