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Peeping Tom
I felt eyes watching me as I took a bath this morning. I caught this guy in the act.So there's a lot to tell.
Yesterday was hectic, long, and near-disastrous. For some reason, everyone showed up late to the morning clinic at Bwafwano-- except me. So I got to get things rolling myself, waiting for everyone else to get here. We finally finished just before noon, and were all set to go to Mungule when ..... ta da! The nurse with the only key to the pharmacy was off getting resupplied! So we had to wait for her to get back before we could pick up our RUTF and hit the road. Because of this, we didn't arrive at the outpost site until about 2.
Mungule was a long clinic all on its own. We had several new admissions to the feeding program, which brought our total now to over 30 kids! I saw a ton of sick children in the meantime, and even got to give an impromptu counseling session to a mom whose baby clearly had Down Syndrome (normally there would be a confirmatory test, but that isn't exactly available here). We didn't get done until well after 5, and then had to make several detours on our way home. I got home after 7,
Puff adder
This guy tried to make the clinic today MUCH more exciting. without having eaten anything since breakfast.
Today started off with me getting a visitor in my bathroom as I was drawing my bath (no, I don't have a shower here). I took a picture. He seems to live in a crack in the corner of my bathroom. I've named him Boris (hats off to all those who get the reference).
The outpost site also started off in an interesting fashion. As we were setting up, we had an unwelcome visitor in the form of a puff adder, which I learned later is the most deadly snake in Africa. I got close enough for a few pictures, and then one of the staff from the clinic took care of it. Today's clinic was pretty standard, except that we have now used up our entire initial ration of RUTF, and Ethel apparently was given a hard time at the clinic that's supposed to be ordering it for us. I may have to regulate tomorrow.
One trouble we have run into is a large number of no-shows on second week follow-ups. I think that the message that children are being enrolled for 8 weeks isn't quite getting across clearly enough.
I talked with the nurses who have been doing enrollment, as well as those in charge of the home-based-care workers. I think we'll be able to get all the delinquents back, and hopefully with more emphatic instructions we won't have this problem going forward.
One other interesting note is that because of the outpost sites we go to, we're looking to go through about 20 boxes of the RUTF every month. That's HUGE! It basically makes us at least as big as any of the government clinics in terms of this program. Go us!
The toughest part of the program so far, for me, has been the kids who
just miss making criteria for the feeding program. They're clearly undernourished, but we can't enroll them to the feeding program and risk losing the privilege of being able to treat all the kids who DO qualify. An example today was a twin pair, just weeks away from turning 5, who weight 10.5 kg (23 lbs) and 10.8 kg (24 lbs). The girl, who was the lighter but taller of the two, was in the borderline zone of the MUAC tape despite almost being too old for the program. The best I could do was give them an apple I had along with me. They'd never seen one before, and had no idea what it was at first.
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Dad
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Boris the Spider?
I don't get credit for this, do I? IIRC, I used to sing it to you guys when you were little. Love, Dad