Back again!

Hello long-lost world of blogging :)

It has rather been ages, but farewell to Africa in August meant farewell to the blog as well! But now that I'm back and settled again in the South Coast, here we go again... I can't make any promises that this time around will be any more successful, or any more frequent, but it is worth a shot!

For the past 3 months, I was back in my hometown and at my job at Sunbeam Residential Development Centre, nursing there for medically fragile children and adults with cognitive and physical developmental delays. It was a fun return to work with the girls there and with the kids - I think I was asked about Rehoboth and my time in South Africa every shift I was in; either that or recognized by the new people there as "oh! YOU'RE the one who went to Africa!"

I flew back to Durbs about 2 weeks ago now, and have been enjoying some sunny R&R before starting up at the clinic again next week. It's been an absolute blast seeing friends and Carl again and just enjoying the fact that it's snowing back in the homeland, and I've got sunburned from the awesomeness of warmth here.

I visited the kids at Rehoboth a week ago Sunday and absolutely got bowled over by the affectionate mobs of children running to say hello - so so lovely! Sometimes it's nice to go away, just to have the fun of coming back again :) It will definitely be fun to be with those kids all the time again!

I'm looking forward to jumping back into the South African health care system and dealing with all the fun little problems we don't get to see in Canada, and work towards making the little clinic something major and effective and productive. It's fun to have your own space to set up how it goes and be able to make change, and see changes made in the little lives :)

And on that note, turrah for now! We'll see how good I get at this!

Goodbye South Africa! See you Just Now!

Today, I packed up all my things and walked around the village to hug all the children and housemums goodbye...so hard to believe that my 7 months of being here are over! It's become such a home to me, that it's strange to think that tomorrow I'm getting on a plane and going back to my other normal life in Canada (!). Unreal.

This morning in devotions, the kids sand and danced as a goodbye and I got to say a few words to the whole group about how much I've enjoyed my time here and that there's no way that I can't return. Rehoboth, the clinic, and espeicially the kids can't keep me away for long :) So even though I've been a rubbish blogger, the blog will continue somewhat, sort of, when I remember to update...so probably infrequently ;)

Can't write much now, but a last farewell for now from,
Nurse Heather in South Africa

It's been a long while!

Hello blogging world!

It has been absolute ages, but now that I've splurged out on my very own Blackberry (!), hopefully updates will happen on a slightly more frequent basis. No promises though...otherwise, in a few months time, this will just look silly.

Let's start out with some more FUN SOUTH AFRICAN VOCAB!

Sizey - means big, or a large amount. Basically to describe anything of bigger-ness.
Bru - what guys call each other. Think 'bro' or 'mate' kind of thing.
Chop -means any range of insult: from idiot, to jerk.
Is it?- said in response to any statement. Doesn't matter if the statement refers to a plural, grammar takes a back seat.
Laanie - means 'fancy'
Slops - the SA term for flip flops
Lightie - means a young person. No age limit, just have to compare to an older person.
Chillo's - like 'chilly'
Aircon - what people say instead of AC as a short form for air conditioning

Ta daaa!

Life continues to be super awesome here. Two weeks ago, I presented to the KwaZulu-Natal (provincial) Health Department about developing a service agreement between us at Rehoboth and the local hospital. So the day of the presentation, Yvonne and I gathered everything together in the board room ... Laptop, projector, screen, promotion DVDs, handout binders, tea, coffee, cookies... And none of our high profile docs and Health Dept people showed up! Not until an hour later, did our fellow meeting people arrive! So that time period gave me some time to just relax the nerves, and be fully ready. Advocating is one of the things about nursing that I absolutely love - that's me in my element. And the fact that I got to do that here, for something I really care about, and for something that's such a big deal with important people in the health care system, is just...woah, amazing! The presentation went so smoothly, and so well! The whole proposal for the service agreement was completely agreed upon! So I'm now in the process of drafting the contract for all parties to sign, which has been pretty cool. :) makes me feel like I'm making a difference, as corny as that sounds! Ha!

Anyways, that's all that my fingers are going to manage writing out on this little keyboard!
Oh, and for those who are curious... I've managed to meet a very nice South African boy here named Carl. Quite the awqesome surprise on this South African adventure! :)

Turrah for now!
Heather

A lesson in language mix-ups: Ek is lekker!

 Hello once again!

I’ve been a super lazy blogger and I really don’t think I can even attempt to write out absolutely everything that’s happened since the last post (!). Nursing and Rehoboth have become just like normal life – it’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 4 months of being here… it’s gone by so fast, but at the same time feels like this has been forever. It’s a very natural flow of things. My job is seriously amazing. I think I’ve said it before, but even after more time being solo in the clinic and being more and more involved, this nursing is just so me. It’s hard to think about going back to Canada and going back to the kind of nursing there… There’s definitely different challenges here, but that’s kind of what makes it fun – it’s just such a different experience than anything I would see or have to handle in Canada, no matter the capacity of job I had. I can only be so full of thanks that I got to come here!!

Another part of having spent a significant amount of time here is picking up a whackload of South African slang:

Jersey = sweater

Vest = tank top (if boys wear them)

Takkies = running shoes

Lekker = good/great/delicious

Ungaas = I don’t know (Zulu)

As well = same as regularly used, but pronounced with more emphasis on the AS, and used a lot more often!

Ja = Yeah

Shame = not used always as ‘what a shame!’ but more like a filler word – there’s a pause, say ‘shame’! Yvonne said when she had her son here, people would come up and ask ‘so what did you have, boy or girl?’ she or Alfons would say ‘boy’ and the response would be ‘aw, shame!’

Rubbish = like in the UK, meaning garbage or trash

Naughty = used much more commonly in reference to misbehaving children

Plaster = bandaid (also like in the UK)

Eish = kind of like an ‘oh man’

Hey = used like our ‘eh’

Baggies & Costume = swimsuits, male and female. So if someone tells you to bring your costume, they don’t mean Halloween.

Oke = short form of ‘bloke’, but they don’t say bloke, only ever oke… so means a guy

Manky = gross

Pitch = verb, means to show up somewhere, like to an event or to work “he didn’t pitch at work today”

Packing with laughter = laughing really hard

Pancakes = crepes; also: our pancakes are called crumpets and are much smaller

Potjie = long-cooking layered stew, pronounced like ‘porky’ in a new york accent

Bobotie = kind of like shepherd’s pie… that’s the closest comparison I can make, from Cape Malay

Vaalies = people from the Transvaal that come to the South Coast (where I am) on holiday for the beaches, notably recognized by wearing speedos/bikinis/surfing gear in the shopping centres, bright red burned skin, and carrying bodyboards around with them everywhere to try and fit in with the locals – the locals don’t like them, but makes for a fun game of ‘spot the tourist’, even I can spot them!

And there’s probably even more, but that’s all the vocab I’ll bore you with today :)

Some quick highlights from the past month or so:

1. Realized how small the world is. A guy in my cell group grew up with my cousin’s cousin in Zimbabwe!
2. Had Easter on the beach at a sunrise service – so beautiful, and so cool to have a HOT Easter and spend the rest of the day on the beach, swimming and soaking up some sun. Gorgeous!
3. Realized I’m a bad Canadian… it’s becoming autumn here, so it will get warm during the day, but once the sun sets, it’s something like 16-18 degrees… and now I’m absolutely FREEZING once it hits that! Wearing long pants and long sleeves; huddling under blankets and cuddling with a hot water bottle! I made so much fun of my South African friends when it was still summer here about their ‘freezing’ temperatures of winter, and now I’m worse than some of them! Man alive. Terrible! How will I cope ever again with -20 degrees??

That’s all for now!

Turrah,

Heather

An ... interesting week.

This past week was hectic! Filled with lots of busy times, nice times, but also WOAH times.

 

Monday was really nice actually in that the preschool at Rehoboth was starting their week on 'people who help us' and they started out with nurses! The preschool is right outside the clinic so I'm usually in and out and see the children (and hear them) throughout the day. When I walked in first thing on Monday after doing the shop, the children were all lined up with hand-made nurse's hats on! It was TOO CUTE. I took pictures. Then Dianne, the preschool teacher/education supervisor, asked if I could help 'inspect the nurses' so we talked about washing hands, and being professionals and taking care of people - oh it was just too cute, really warmed my heart! Dianne had made a 'hospital' in the preschool for the children to play in with dolls as patients and a sink to 'wash hands' and doctor's bag kind of toys like stethoscopes, bandages, thermometres, white coats. You could hear them saying things that you KNOW they must hear all the time, "don't cry, it doesn't hurt", "finish your medicine", "it's just a small pinch" (pinch is what they call injections/having blood taken). Later on, I brought out my real stethoscope and each one had a chance to listen to their own heart. That was really fun! They were so in awe of this beating thing inside of them.

 

After Monday, life got a little more .... interesting. Had some appointments at the hospital, so went there to pick up the monthly medication as well. Usually there's no problems, just long waits sometimes. When they brought out the meds, the pharmacist asked me "you know that we've stopped giving out meds to NGO's other than ARV's (meds for HIV), right?". Of course I said that no, I hadn't known that, and when did this come about - "oh just recently". Ooook? So we took the meds that they gave us, but as Rahel and I were driving back to the village, my brain was racing to remember what we have stock of and what we were depending on this monthly medication coming in ... we have kids on TB medication, anti-epileptic medication, inhalers, so much that is really important! There will be a meeting next week (after we called teh medical director of the hospital), but at the moment we really needed the one boy's anti-epileptic meds - they were goign to be finished on Wednesday. Fortunately, it was also the big clinic day this week on Thursday, so after some frantic-ish calling around, we came to the silly conclusion that Sphe would just have to be there at clinic in person, and THEN the hospital would give us his meds. So ridiculous - she saw him a few weeks ago to prescribe the new meds... gah. Whatever, it's Africa.

 

This month's clinic is Blood Clinic - meaning, blood tests! Only 16 of the children needed testing done (compared to the norm of all 55), so that was a little less to arrange, but I did a huge amount of prep to get ready for our paediatrician to come to Rehoboth with gathering supplies from the hospital, filling out all the virology request forms, other forms, labelling the blood tubes, and figuring out how to calmly get 16 children (including infants and toddlers) into the clinic and out again in the space of about an hour and a half. I'd been working on this for more than a week, so I was definitely ready. I had prepped all the housemums with appointment cards and announcements during devotions, had rearranged teh clinic slightly to make it a more usable space, and had even cleaned! We were all set for the paediatrician to arrive on Thursday morning at 0900.

 

Thursday morning at 0845: text from the doctor, "We can't come to Rehoboth, can you bring the children here?" ............. ahhhhhh!

Thursday I learned the value of flexibility.

We managed to coordinate enough drivers and enough housemums to come along to help manage the kids, I packed up everythign necessary to take with us, and we trucked over 17 children, 3 house mums, all their files, all their blood tubes, all their forms, myself, and Tamara. Yikes! Once we arrived, our doctor told us that the hospital had not ALLOWED her to come to Rehoboth. There is definitely something tricky going on... she was upset about this as well, because we had to bring all the kids into an already rather crowded, small paediatric ward and can you imagine if it had been a month when all the kids needed to come? It'd be unreal! Luckily, she will be at the meeting next week to discuss what services the hospital will be providing for Rehoboth, and I know she will help advocate for us. Definitely something to pray about!

 

Thankfully, the craziness of the week was over by Thursday afternoon. The rest of the time since then has been wonderfully relaxing... cell group Thursday night, Friday was just calm in the clinic (besides the norm busy things), and today Rahel and I explored the Uvongo flea market, and went to the beach before coming here to the internet cafe! It's nice to have the weekend :)

The Kindness of Strangers

This past weekend I had an absolutely lovely time going on a mini-safari kind of adventure at Lake Eland Game Reserve - a place actually quite close to where I live - with two ladies in their 60s. How did this come about? Let me tell you.

A long, long time ago in January when I was first flying here, I was on the last leg of my three day journey and waiting in the Joburg airport to catch my flight to Durban. A few of us sitting around the gate to board were just chatting away mostly about nothing and about flights, and it was a nice little sociable time to keep me awake in my state of complete jetlag. As we boarded the plane, an older couple that had been part of this chatting were actually my seat-mates for the flight, so that was a happy little coincidence. They pointed out different sites as we flew over the landscape, and we had a nice talk over the whole flight. I told them I was a nurse from Canada and I was going to a children's village called Rehoboth near Port Shepstone - "we're FROM Port Shepstone!" So we sort of chatted about where I thought Rehoboth was, and they were interested a bit since they hadn't heard of it before. When the flight ended, we said a little goodbye, and off I went - didn't think about it again really.

Three weeks ago, a phone call came to Rehoboth - 'is there a volunteer from Canada there with you? Heather?' - they had tracked me down! And wanted to visit! How old world friendlier can you get?! It was so sweet. :) We had a nice chat on the phone and made some potential weekend plans that we ended up changing to this weekend when Denise's (that's her name) friend could also join us since she 'really knew' Lake Eland and 'where all the animals like to hide'. We talked on the phone a few more times to solidify plans, and then it was Saturday and the big meet-up! I think I've been successfully adopted. Haha! It was like meeting an old friend, it was really lovely. Perhaps this means I've been accepted by the locals? Huzzah!

The animals were really spectacular to see and get close to in our massive 4x4 - we went off-roading almost the entire time to get closer to anything we saw. I think they called it "bushbacking" or something instead of 'off-roading'. Oh, South African slang :) Shame, man!

One of the house mums has started teaching me more Zulu:
Kubuhlungu? Laphi? La!
(It's sore? Where? Here!)

Turrah for now!
Heather

Want to Lose Weight, Fast?

...Move to South Africa!
Then start having lovely dysentery/dumping syndrome/food poisoning type symptoms, and POOF, in only 4 days time, you'll lose 3 kilo's!

In reality, last week I got sick with some sort of horrid GI virus which basically led to me not keeping any food in me for 4 days. I spent those 4 days basically on complete bed rest with zero energy to even walk myself to the bathroom and back. Horrible! I have huge amounts more empathy now for anybody on bed rest... I'm not a very good patient - my poor roommates!

Luckily, I'm on the mend and managed to get back to work and the clinic this week. Still not 100%, but at least approaching 90%.

On Wednesday this week, a Dutch film crew came to film us at Rehoboth! Tamara applied for this tv program in Holland that focuses on Dutch people who have emigrated to other places and what they're doing now - and she got in! So they've been following her around since Wednesday and it's been loads of fun to have them around. When they arrived, Rahel and I had just finished eating dinner together as Tam was waiting for them, and all of a sudden there they were with cameras and everything (!). So they filmed us at the house a little bit, and my other new claims to fame/time on screen happened over the next few days at morning devotions with the whole village singing and dancing with the kids, at the preschool, and last night we were at a friend's house in Port Shepstone for a braai that they came to film as well. It's a hoot! There's more filming today and tomorrow, and then it's all over. Apparently the camera man and sound guy have both taken a fancy to me - Tamara keeps coming back to the house and telling stories about how the two were talking: "You know that nurse girl who runs the clinic? She's nice, eh?" "Oh ya ya, she's nice" "Will she be comign to the braai as well?" "She was sick last week? We could've been there to give her CPR!" TOO FUNNY. Especially since they really dont' talk to me - haha!!! Tamara, Rahel and I have a good laugh at their expense, anyway. BUT - if I have made quite the impression with the camera guy, perhaps that means I will definitely become famous from extra air time ;)

Turrah for now!
Heather, International Television Star