The NGO health center

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Once again, the Americans we were staying with worked at a health center. They showed us around and told us some of the projects they were working on. Their clinic had an in-patient ward, a tuberculosis program, vaccination out-reach, a malnutrition program, etc. It was all very impressive. We did rounds with the doctor and his nurses; there were only 3 or so patients. One of the patients had measles and he was in isolation. They had to deal with some stuff regarding WHO regulations, and per diem; I won’t get into it here, you can try and find their blog if you are so inclined. We saw some interesting stuff, measles and maggots in a kid’s head, you won’t see that in America. Unless you’re one of those naïve, uninformed parents that doesn’t vaccinate your children, then you might see measles.

I did outreach with the one of the Americans. We drove out to Boba Getcha, which is a more rural community, to administer vaccinations. They have several outreach sites, I forget how many. The drive was maybe 20 minutes or so. We then drove through the town, which you couldn’t tell was a town, and a worker used a megaphone to announce our presence as we drove through the community. There is a new health clinic in the town that we used as a dispensing site. The clinic, which is government run, does not have funding for staff yet, but the facilities were very nice and the grounds were big. It was a good day and we gave out vaccines constantly from about 9 until 12:30. We were late to lunch we were so busy, so it was a very good day. They also do rapid HIV/AIDS testing on out-reach as well. Zero HIV/AIDS cases that day, which really isn’t a problem, yet, in rural communities. We transported two patients back to Chiri. One was a one month old baby with a bad infection, she died the next day.

It was very interesting to take part in and learn about their organization and to hear about their struggles with trying to help people. One of the outreach sites’ population is almost completely sheltered from outsiders; you need to hike for a day to get to the borders of their territory. They haven’t visited in little while as they were making demands and having unrealistic expectations; they expect Western medicine to cure everything and that one pill is enough, so they hand out the pills to everyone instead of one patient doing the full regiment. We also joked about the Ethiopian saying, “it’s possible.” “Will you give this patient their medicine?” “Yes, it’s possible.” Well yeah, of course it’s possible, but how probably is it?

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