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 :)
