A Day In the Life

The following post from Tracy...

This is what Marideth and I typically do during the day when we’re working at the hospital… Morning report is at 7:30 am, and this is a little conference with the doctors and nurses from the hospital where we review patients who were admitted overnight and discuss the more complex patients. It is actually similar to morning report at Children’s Mercy. Then, from 8:00 am until noon, we see the patients in the pediatric ward. There are about 100 to see each day, and we have usually seen 80 by noon. Almost all of the patients we see have malaria, so it is easy to move through them quickly. We come back to our guesthouse at noon to eat lunch, and we don’t have to be back to the hospital until 2:30 pm. At first, we thought that was an excessive amount of time for lunch, but seeing 80 patients every morning in a hot pediatric ward is pretty tiring, so we appreciate our long lunch! Then, from 2:30 until 5:00 pm, we see the rest of the patients and do any necessary procedures, like lumbar punctures. When we come back to the guesthouse after work, we usually head to the market to pick-up fresh ingredients for dinner, and then we cook and hang out with our housemates. Although we see about 5X as many patients per day here as we would see in the states, the overall pace of life here is much slower, so it doesn’t seem overwhelming. We have been able to do a lot of fun reading and relaxing, which we really appreciate. We hope that everyone back home is doing great! We miss you! (And I even miss the snow back in the U.S., although Marideth is quite excited about the warm weather here!!)

All the beds in the pediatric ward are small- the size of cribs in the U.S., and the patient plus their parent sleep in that little bed!
We cook all of our own meals because we are in a small village with no restaurants. Here are Penny and I chopping veggies...
...and Marie and Marideth. Thankfully, our guesthouse has a very nice kitchen (we even have a fridge and a freezer!).
This is the outside of our guesthouse. It is quite nice. There is a big kitchen and eating/sitting area at the front of the house, then 10 bedrooms in the back of house (and each bedroom has its own bathroom with a sink/shower/toilet).