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This week two of us (Britany and Brooklyn) began the first week of our placement at the Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital in Mbarara, which is where we took our first week of orientation. We are back in the same houses we were before, and there was some comfort in coming back to a place that was familiar. We also have reunited with the other 4 students of our original 12 that had been in a different community for the last 4 weeks. The other members of our group chose to stay in Rugazi until the middle of the upcoming week, and we are so excited to have them back here in Mbarara with us come Wednesday!
We got the opportunity to choose which wards we wanted to be on for our six weeks in the hospital. Myself (Britany), Carrie, and another nursing student Montana chose to do three weeks on maternity/obstetrics and then three weeks on surgery emergency. Other wards we could have chosen from include pediatrics (toto) ward, medical wards (male and female), general emergency, and then the nutrition ward for the nutrition students in our group.
An ordinary day on the mat/gyn ward is us
taking part in rounds with the obstetricians and charge nurses, followed sometimes by helping with discharges, and then often getting to deliver babies or help in the theatre with caesareans! It is a very busy ward. We one time asked a nurse how many babies she thought they delivered a day, on average, and she replied with at least 10! Needless to say, it didn’t take long for us to observe a few deliveries and then jump in and help deliver them ourselves. On Friday we had a particularly busy day; we had just delivered one baby and I was tending to the newborn, and I turned around and a mother who had just walked in was already crowning. I barely had time to switch gloves before I preceded to deliver this baby. We then had our next delivery less than 10 minutes after that. So much excitement and so much life brought into the world! The babies here are seriously cute, with their big lips and big, open eyes. I often stand there talking to them and admiring them and the moms and nurses laugh at me, but I just can’t help it!
The process of delivering a
baby is essentially the same for all mothers across the globe, however, there are some major differences in nursing care here compared to back home in Canada. At home a lot of the care provided is psychosocial, and, in my experience, very much family-centered. Here, males are not allowed in the delivery room and there is not much communication between nurse/midwife and mother. One time while delivery a baby, I was saying the local language version of yes! push! yes!, and the midwives all laughed at me for encouraging the mom. Observing caesareans was also very interesting to watch (they essentially wear dogs or crocs here in all ORs), and the newborns here receive exponentially less attention than they do in Canada.
Overall, my first week on obs/gyn was fantastic and I am so very excited to go back Monday morning. Many of the staff members have been very receptive and welcoming, in fact so much so that on Friday the head nurse invited us to a party where her friend was giving away her daughter! We weren’t really sure what to expect but we said absolutely yes. We decided it was most likely some kind of engagement party,
but once we arrived (after getting lost only once), we decided it must instead be a wedding. There was a huge buffet with a great variety of food, at least 300 people all dressed to the nines, and a beautiful area set up for a reception. We ate, and then sat down and watched many local dancers, speeches, gift giving, and ceremonial things with the bride and groom. Towards the end, we asked the man sitting beside if all weddings were like this-he then proceeded to tell us that oh no, this is not a wedding, this is just the bride’s family giving her away! Wedding are much more extravagant than this, he told us. We couldn’t believe it-this ceremony was much more detailed, large, and beautiful than any wedding we had been to in Canada.
Anyways, it was a great way to end the week and we are so excited to go back to work on Monday, to reunite with the rest of the group back when they come to Mbarara on Wednesday, and to next weekend when we are going on a mini safari!
Thanks for reading 😊
Britany
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