the last 7 days

Well this week was again quite busy with classes and trips out into the community.  The first great thing is that most team members are finally starting to feel well again after last's week sickness attacks.  We were able to get out into the community on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  On Wednesday, we went to see what traditional daily life is like a village.  We met Reverend David and his family as well as two other families that live in community together.  David is pastor of a Wesleyan Church in the village about 45 minutes outside of Choma. I provided some maps of Zambia above so that you can see a little bit of where we've been.  I couldn't find any maps with more detail of places we've been but I tried my best.  So after we arrived in the village outside of Choma we were given a wonderful tour of David's land and his garden.  We took probably a 10 minute walk from where their home was to where their garden was.  David has been incredibly smart -- during the rainy season he figured out a way to dam the rain water that was made a river near his home so that he would have a water supply for the rest of the year to sustain his garden.  We were able to help water the garden which required us to get into the pond and get on this contraption that I thought was just like a stair step machine...it was so much fun to learn how the Zambians live their daily lives.  After time spent in the garden we went back to their home area and learned how to pound maize (corn) into mealy meal which is what the Zambian's use to make nshima.

pumping water to the garden

making mealy meal

making mealy meal

Later in the week we went to a village to see their Home Based Care and Orphan and Vulnerable Children program that World Hope sponsors.  We saw their poultry house that houses 300 chickens which supports the OVC program.  We met with a caregiver who has been taking care of an orphan for just over 6 years.  They were a beautiful family who shared so much with us.

the poultry project

the OVC family we visited with

This week starts a new adventure.  Yesterday morning we woke up bright and early (had to be ready by 6:30am) to leave to go to Macha Mission Hospital.  We will be spending Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for this week and next week as well as the following entire week in Macha. This is the hospital where Johns Hopkins University Hospital sponsors a Malaria Research Institute.  We toured the research institute as well as the school of nursing connected to the hospital and the hospital.  The hospital is actually pretty large.  There is a men’s & women’s ward, pediatric ward, maternal ward, ART (anti-retroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS) clinic, and a TB ward.  There is also a radiography suite and an outpatient clinic with a TB clinic connected to it.  It was a pretty crazy day.  The entire morning we pretty much toured everything and then in the afternoon we spent about an hour on the wards.  I was on the maternal ward.  We assisted the nurses in taking vital signs of any mothers that were ante-partum or who had had C-sections.  I have learned how to assess a mother if they are pregnant and find out how many weeks they are by the height of their fundus.  I can also now figure out the presenting parts and where the head and back are located within the stomach, and the most exciting thing, is I learned how to listen for the fetal heart rate by using a fetoscope (the OLD style of assessing fetal heart rates)—then the Macha Hospital also has a Doppler to find heart rates of the babies if they can’t find it with the fetoscope.  I was kind of freaking out yesterday because while taking vitals and assessing the mothers I wasn’t able to find the heart rate of one of the fetus’ and so I asked the nurse to check herself, then she couldn’t find it.  After what seemed like forever (really probably only a minute or so) we were able to find the baby’s heart rate.  So needless to say, it was quite an interesting and eventful day!

Macha Mission Hospital

One final thing -- hopefully none of you are too bored -- this past weekend it was Christine and my weekend to plan something fun for our team to do on Saturday night.  We planned a game night extravaganza.  It turned out great and we had so much fun!!

   that is all for now. hopefully i'll update more often so you don't have to be bombarded with tons of stuff to read and lots of pictures to look at.  one last thing...we had the first Zambian rain here today!  It was beautiful!!