Friday

Friday, beautiful friday.  I've never really had a fondness quite like this for fridays in my post-college life...Every third weekend for pretty much 7 years, I spent most of the daylight hours in the hospital, which meant that those fridays I spent enjoying free time, the calm before the storm of "my weekend" on.  I have way more routine here in Africa than I ever had in the States...

Anyways, I currently find myself at Java's.  This is a very interesting place, I've never been to such a place anywhere else in the world...it's a coffee shop/cafe (complete with a variety of pastries in the glass display counter/cabinet next to the cash register)/gas station convenience store/wireless internet location located on Bombo Road here in Kampala...which pretty much is the heart of the city...so I'm sitting outside at a table under the roof overhang, with a fence with fake shrubs between me and the roar of the traffic rushing past, just across the gas station lot from a Firestone-like tire place called City Tyre...I had a diet coke to start while I spent a half hour downloading the week's emails (65 I think there were), then when dinner time rolled around I got 2 beef samosas and a kick butt mocha milkshake.  After I'm finished here in a few minutes I'll get a few groceries in the convenience store, and find a way home...not quite sure what that way home will be quite yet but it's nice to postpone the inevitable stress of finding safe/reasonably priced transport around here.

I'll spare you the back and forth details of this week's nursing station  conversations, but it's been an interesting mix of really interesting cultural discussions and painful, guilt-inducing conversations re. how I should take all of them back to the States with me because the US Embassy won't give them visas to go on their own, and so on and so forth.  I've learned a lot here in Kampala, and only a small portion of it has been related to nursing.

Interesting perceptions/beliefs about America/Americans:

-HIV is not in America

-Americans are only allowed to have one child

-Americans don't really get sick and die of things

-America doesn't want Africans in our country

-Americans like being called Muzungu

-Americans can all provide well for all of the children they bring into the world

etc. etc. etc.

This week I saw an LP done successfully on a 3 mo baby using a 23 guage needle included in the package with a disposable syringe instead of a spinal needle.  The oxygen for the majority of the peds medical ward is supplied by a single concentrator at the nurses station with a whole bunch of pieces of tubing y'd together and snaked across the hall into the room where each kid gets their own branch of the same common tubing (therefore everyone has to be on the same amount of oxygen).  The names of the 5-6 bed rooms on the peds medical ward include: Jumpy, Speedy, Beetle, Flipper, Rainbow and a few others..."Where's the chart for Flipper 3?"  "Jumpy 5 is being discharged today"

Okay, time to head home.