April 30, 2008 Wednesday

This blog was meant to be written on Monday evening (4/28) but because the power was out for the entire evening, we were unable to enter our thoughts from that day.

Kaloko Village Clinic:

Marcia Bartz writing:

As one of the 2 nurses on the pharmacy team, I would like to take this opportunity to share some of my experiences and observations from our clinic today. The clinic served approximately 470 patients and we filled roughly 1200 – 1500 prescriptions, and this was one of the healthier villages we have seen since we have been here. In our days together as a team, we have developed a system where we can anticipate what is needed with very few words, if any. This has allowed us to do this many prescriptions in one clinic.

Today our set-up was in a building with separate rooms. Each part of the clinic had its own room, and they were small with very dim light so I took my contacts out. In pharmacy, we had one table where we directly faced our two lines of patients. Karen and Chriss worked as a team as did Wendy and I. I really enjoyed having this direct contact with each person we served. We gave out many prescriptions for vitamins, pain meds, antibiotics, malaria medicines, dehydration pacts, and de-worming medications to babies as little as 2 weeks to 80 years old. Some interesting things happened in pharmacy today. One of our elderly male patients was so appreciative of our services that he walked back to his small home in the village and brought back Nshima stir sticks for us that he had made. He carved these “large stir spoons” out of wood. Nshima is the primary food made and eaten by all Zambians. Nshima actually means “food” in the native Zambian language and is made from corn and looks somewhat like grits. We ended up buying 6 spoons from him in the pharmacy. After we filled his prescriptions and bought his spoons, he knelt down in front of the pharmacy table and said, “thank you, thank you, thank you” --- thank you for coming to my village.

Later that day, I had the opportunity to observe in our wound center, which was in the room next door and run by Gil Harrington, an RN from Virginia. One of the interesting cases she had was a bee keeper. One and a half years ago, he was using smoke to sedate his hive and a fire broke out. His son was killed and he was burned over a large percentage of his body. He spent 6 months in the hospital. He came to the clinic today still showing some open wounds from this fire. Gil used her magic with peroxide, silvadene, and tube socks and redressed all of his wounds. We are lucky to have this amazing experience and creativity on our team. Gil’s philosophy is, “we are helping to save Africa with duct tape, tube socks, OR excess/trash, flip flops, candy canes and clean water”.

We do have our “funny moments” during our clinics. Gil asked me today, “do you have bats in your room?” I thought she said slats in your room, and she asked, “are they squeaking?” Then she pointed up to the bats hanging from the ceiling in her wound care room. Only in Africa! Our room had a light bulb that would only work after it was wrapped with duct tape. They wanted to also put in some newspaper but we have standards and I don’t know how close a fire department is.

I have really been blessed to have this great experience. OMNI is a wonderful giving group of people and I have been blessed to be a part of this team.