lmorea

This morning we finished up most of our packing. When Pam got home from teaching she took us to a place called Sugar and Spice for pancakes (crepes) that were really good. The restaurant was in the courtyard of a mall and since the weather here is beautiful (70-80 every day) it was perfect. After lunch we perused the shops at the mall and then headed out for Katatura. If you'll remember, Katatura is the informal housing settlement near the hospital. We went out to the far end of Katatura to a place called Penduka. Penduka was initially founded as a place to help women support themselves and live independently. They teach women embroidery, batik, pottery making and other crafts and then sell these crafts in a shop on the premises and various other shops in ... 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

So that Nephrology rotation I did prior to coming here has really been coming in handy. It seems that much like in the US, the doctors here are a bit baffled by Nephrology. A little girl was admitted with edema, 4+ protein in the urine, and hypertension and the MO decided that since she had hypertension it must be glomerulonephritis even though she didn't have any blood in her urine. I insisted that it must be nephrotic syndrome and sure enough the labs confirmed my diagnosis. That little girl is crazy cute too. She doesn't speak English but always gives us a big smile when we examine her. There is another little girl on my ward who is 11 years old and this is her second admission this month for "intractable headaches" that miraculously disappear as ... read more

This weekend we went to Erindi Game Reserve which was the most amazing experience of our lives!! We saw so many wonderful and beautiful animals that it would be terribly boring if we recounted the whole thing but we will use the next 2 blogs to give you the highlights. Erindi is a 72,000 hectacre privately owned game reserve about 2 hours north of Windhoek. Even on the drive to the park we saw baboons, ostrich, kudu and springbok. As we were driving into the reserve Pam played the soundtrack from Out of Africa which was quite apropos. There is a very fancy lodge on the property and one of their goals is to fatten up all of the humans (they feed you 5-6 times a day). About an hour after lunch every day they have ... read more