Our Official Tour Guide

This morning we met 14 community health workers at the hospital for our first training, focusing on bleeding, shock, and spinal stabilization. As Eric described in the first post in the blog, the community health workers will be the first responders for the emergency response project. When community members are injured or sick, the community health worker will provide the initial medical assistance and will determine whether or not to send the person to the hospital. When they arrived I observed a few Lifeline Ambulance pens that were given out in our March trip. They asked for more because the ink had run out. In March, we presented a long PowerPoint with an overview of basic first aid. While we are here for the next 6 weeks we are going to break that large PowerPoint down into smaller more focused sections with a lot of hands on learning. Today we had them group up and practice bleeding control and spinal stabilization. Overall, the training session with them was very successful and they all looked forward to working with us again. The plan is to shadow the community health workers who showed up to this training in their villages next week on Tuesday and Thursday.

After lunch we went on a hike today with Professor Hyde and Andrew to collect water samples from different sources. For the second day in a row we had a 10 year old tour guide named Alandi. Although his English was limited he was able to lead us to the water sources then back to the compound safely. Along the way many locals joined in the hike. Today was the first time I had been to the area of town we explored today. It was much poorer than the area around the hospital. Children were bathing in water surrounded by masses of garbage. Upstream of the children pigs were walking around in the water. In the market the food was covered in a layer of flies, and due to broken local latrines, the pathway surrounding the market had become the local’s new bathroom. I wish I could say that this was an exaggeration.

On a happier note, tomorrow we are going to go to a market in Don Don for our first day trip and the first medical team is coming down since we have been here. It is a surgical team made up of 7 people. Hopefully this will give us an opportunity to see and participate in some more surgery.