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Published: April 6th 2015
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view from my hotel room Day (I'm not even sure.. they are blurring together)
Firstly I’d like to apologize for the lack of posts over the past week. I suppose I could have posted little musings each day but I feel like taking one hard look at what I experienced over the past week has its own benefits. I met the Lighthouse missions group in the Nairobi airport and was pleasantly surprised to see that the group was largely of individuals close to my own age. That being said I was originally pretty timid due to the fact that the group seemed very close and were even wearing matching shirts making me awkwardly aware of how much of an outsider I was. They were also fairly curt when I attempted to converse with them which I’m sure was due to the fact that they had just spent an entire day traveling. Over the next few days I was welcomed into their family as one of their own. It’s amazing how close people can become in such a short period of time when they live and work together in this sort of environment. I feel as if I have made some fast friends and I hope
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Keeping waiting patients entertained through Swahili worship songs that we remain in contact and that I see them again and work with them on future missions.
For those of you that don’t know, my first week in Africa was to be spent in Mwanza working in an acute care clinic with a group composed of medical practitioners and laypeople associated with Lighthouse Church of Santa Monica. I had my reservations about how much good an acute care clinic could do as I personally believe that when giving aid to developing countries the best aid should be sustainable in nature i.e. education or some way of permanently improving the infrastructure. That being said, I knew it would be a fantastic learning experience and an efficient stepping stone into absorbing cultural differences in that I would be living with a group of Americans while spending my days with Africans. Not to mention it got me a free round trip ticket to the continent (shout out to MDF Instruments once again). It turns out my reservations were, while not completely unfounded, irrelevant. While we did not bring a whole lot to the table in terms of sustainable aid to the community, we impacted hundreds of lives and likely saved more
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work/school for a week than a few.
The clinic ran from about 8:30-4:30 each day and was composed of a cardiologist, a pediatrician, a physician’s assistant, a nurse practitioner, a family practice doctor, a chiropractor, 3 nurses, and about 10 volunteers without medical experience who worked as scribes, crowd control/entertainment, in the pharmacy, and generally doing anything that needed to be done. Also there were local volunteers who worked as translators, an absolutely vital role. For the first few days I mostly worked as an assistant to the DC who completely convinced me that chiropractors play an integral role in the world of medicine. I’ve noticed that many people, myself included, have a bad experience with one DC and discount the entire practice. As he put it “if you have a bad experience with a dentist are you going to give up on taking care of your teeth?” This guy knew his stuff, and then some, from parasites to women’s health issues. I learned quite a bit assisting him and was able to practice some soft tissue mobilization on a few of the patients. When it was necessary I would leave the orthopedic station and help in whatever way I could. Sometimes I
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look ma aminals! would relieve one of the nurses of triaging patients and would take blood pressures (with my handy MDF stethoscope), take temperatures, and assess other symptoms before sending them to the appropriate care giver. I also administered a few malaria tests and spent time entertaining the kids (and myself) by playing soccer. Now and then I would have the joy of doing something more closely related to my field such as teaching a mother soft tissue mobilization and techniques to increase range of motion in her son who experienced contractures throughout the left side of his body, most likely due to a stroke.
On the fourth day we held the clinic for just half a day in order to have some time to explore Mwanza. Most of the younger volunteers opted to tour a local island that is a sort of miniature game preserve that shipped in and breeds exotic animals. I’ll be sure to include some pictures.
Overall I absolutely loved the experience and the people I worked with. Mwanza was a beautiful city and I wish that I was able to spend another week there. It was much more difficult than I had expected to leave the people and the work that I had come to love in such a short period of time. The odds aren’t great that I’ll be able to join Lighthouse on their trips over the next few years while I’m in PT school but I fully expect to join their team again one day assuming the role of a legitimate physical therapist.
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