Blogs from Windhoek, Namibia, Africa - page 6

Raissa and I started our 1st day of work as doctors at Katatura State Hospital today. We were definately a nice mix of excited and nervous for starting. It is a large hospital (pics to come) and pediatrics is on the top floor, 8th. Dr. Brown is the only full time consultant (like attending pediatrician/specialist) in the WHOLE country! That is just amazing to consider. We arrived around 8am, and joined a conference of brand new interns. Internship in Namibia is 2 years, with only 4 months total of pediatrics! that is all the training they receive for peds. Dr. Brown runs lectures frequently during the week for them, and is the doc for the Gastro (GI) unit. After we met everyone, and they heard the intro talk from Dr. Brown, we went on a quick ... read more

Yesterday morning we ran some errands with Dr. Brown and one of the stores we stopped in was Game, which is Namibia's version of Walmart. It was just as awful as Walmart except for their fun hot pink uniforms. Apparently Walmart has actually bought out Game which a lot of Namibians are upset about. We also passed the Namibian Lions Club, so Aunt Bev you can bring your mobile home here anytime :) When we got back we had to perfom some giraffe surgery. We bought a carved giraffe in Okahandja that is way to big for our suitcase so Katie sawed off all of his legs and we will have to reconstruct him when we get back home. We then spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing, blogging and starting to do some packing. For ... read more

Today we went with Pam and Jennifer and did what we thought was some last minute shopping. We went back to the Namibian Craft Centre. The center has a wide variety of different crafts and the proceeds go directly to the crafters. Some of the crafts are made by organizations to help support women or people with HIV and TB. We did some damage to our pocketbooks and purchased some lovely souvenirs. We did go back to the street craft vendors and the experience was not as stressful today. We attributed this to the fact that there were more people shopping so they didn't feel as urgent of a need to attract our business. We visited the stall with the Himba women and asked them if we could take their picture, to which they replied "money." ... read more

Yesterday I (Katie) was able to spend time in the ARV (anti retroviral) clinic. (Lauren had the same experience today) It is the HIV/AIDS clinic in the hospital funded by the CDC. It is very different from the rest of the hospital. It is very clean, there are computers, and it is well organized. Education and counseling are very important parts of the clinic, so before the patients see the doctor, they speak with the counselor. I spent time in the pediatric part of the clinic. The country has developed a book to help children understand the importance of taking anti-retroviral medications for HIV. The book comes in many different languages and has pictures. They usually introduce the book in a stepwise fashion starting around age 7. The first part of the book enforces the fact ... read more

Thought we'd let everyone know a little bit about the lovely place we've been staying for the last 3.5 weeks. Namibia was a German colony from 1880 to 1915, at which point it was taken over by South Africa and their apartheid policies. Namibia gained independence from South Africa in 1990. The country is about 320,000 square miles (about the size of Texas and Oklahoma together) The population is only 2.1 million which is less than twice the population of Philadelphia. It is the 2nd least densely populated country in the world. Windhoek, where we are, is the capital and the largest city. The water in the whole country (other than a small region in the north) is treated and safe to drink. The country is classified as lower middle income, but 10% of the people ... read more