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I spent much of the day volunteering at the hospital today, so things were pretty boring but I figure I should probably write about my experiences in the hospital too, or I will forget about them!
I arrived at the hospital at 8, just in time for rounds on the different wards. We walked through the surgical wards, general wards, PICU, NICU, VICU (ventilator icu) and see patients. The hospital is not full right now so there aren't that many patients to see. I spent much of the morning in Dr. X's office, which is where the outpatients come through and he sees them rather quickly. he acts both as a paediatrician as well as he's a general pediatric surgeon. He certainly wears many hats!
At 11, Katie and I had to prepare for our presentation on hand washing. It's amazing how we take such a simple, yet crucial, act of infection control for granted. Here it is not something that is automatically done and definitely takes encouragement. Cleanliness is not on the same standard that we have in North America. So the organization I am volunteering with designed this presentation for the volunteers to do for the staff
and nurses to do a couple of times in the summer to teach them the importance of hand washing.
We used this powder/lotion that is invisible under normal light but visible under UV light to emulate germs. We first put the lotion on their hands and we asked them to wash their hands normally and then with the UV light, we checked how well they did. Then we taught them the proper way to wash and have them do it again, but we replaced one of the towels with a dirty one with the special powder (to emulate a dirty towel and how you can do a good job washing but it doesnt matter if you use a dirty towel) on it and had them wash and dry their hands again with proper washing. The ladies who had the dirty towel looked so panicked when they saw all the "germs" on their hands — we had to assure them we had played a trick on them. It's nice to see how concerned they were with cleanliness! They were obviously bothered by that and this will probably stick in their heads.
Katie did most of the talking for the
presentation, but I helped out Vanna White-style. Not too much more happened in the afternoon. I thought it was really funny because a guy at the hospital offered to dump our water buckets for us and when we got back to get them, they were gone. I looked everywhere for them and then asked the same guy and he (obviously not speaking English) where the buckets were, and he didn't know. I don't think it's that hard to understand what I was talking about because I was signalling bucket and the last time he had seen us, he had taken the buckets. He did obviously understand me because he brought me to a room that had tons of buckets, but not ours (they were different). So eventually I said that colour didn't matter and he gave me a bucket. I thought wow so typical, giving back random buckets. But then later we discovered that he had actually put our buckets back outside the volunteer office for us. It's funny he didn't just tell us that!
Later in the afternoon we went to see an echo cardiogram being done (which is a mix between ultrasound and Doppler to look at the heart). Finally we left the hospital around 6pm to go back to Thamel for dinner. One by one everyone seems to be switching into the hotel where I'm staying because its really cheap but nice and peaceful. Katie moved over tonight and I think the Ottawa guys will soon too because they're getting tired of their $5 a day hostel. My hotel, International Guest House costs $15 for a clean private room with breakfast (summer price). I highly recommend this hotel to anyone!!! Then we went to dinner at the Roadhouse Cafe, which isn't Nepali, but the food is good and has a nice atmosphere. Why do restaurants have such nice atmospheres when you're in a foreign place and we can't quite find ones as good at home?!?
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