New visitor, weekend at Batanai and Surgeons came, saying goodbye to Julia

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On Saturday the 14th Julia Peacock from Brisbane, Australia arrived as our visitor for 1 month.  She is a nurse who works as an Operating Nurse.  She is here on her vacation time to work with us.

On Monday Dr. Megan Fitzpatrick from Stanford University arrived to start her research project and will be with us for several weeks in the next few weeks as she is data collecting.

On Friday night at prayer time we celebrated that Carolyn Mereki passed her A levels with 7 points.  We took time to thank God and sing and dance.

On Saturday the 21st it was our support group for our older AIDS kids.  We also have a group for their caregivers.  We had a time of questions and answers and then served tea, hard boiled eggs and bread and biscuits for them to take home.   They really look forward to this time and it is so exciting to see the kids as they have grown up on medication to keep them alive and they are doing well.

Saturday afternoon I took Julia and Megan to Major's and my village to spend the night and see how village life is.  We went to church on Sunday morning and then spent the rest of the day looking at my fields, enjoying the rain .  We tried to go home at 7 p.m. and had to turn around and go back to Batanai because the river was too full to cross  and wait a couple of hours and we finally got across about 930 p.m.  It was a busy weekend!

On this last Friday our surgeons from Harare came and this time 2 surgeons, 2 anesthetists and 1 scrub nurse came.  Dr. Mashayamombe and Dr. Ruwizhu joined Mr. Kuwaona and Dr. Kajese.    They ate dinner and at 8:30 p.m. started surgeries.  Julia help scrub until 4 a.m. after she got back from 3 days of safari!   They kept going until noon on Saturday--doing 18 cases!  They are such hard workers it wears all of us out!!  It is such a big help to our patients to have their skills and help.  So many people are helped that can't afford to go to Harare and also pay for surgeries.

This has been a busy week with ZACH trainers in HIV joining us from Tuesday night until Wednesday afternoon.  They had sponsored 2 workshops for us with Village Health Workers and Community leaders on Wednesday and Thursday to inform them of the new Ministry of Health guidelines of test all for HIV and if you are positive get treated.  They are helping us get the message out to all of our villagers.  We also spent time talking about Typhoid which we have been fighting an outbreak since December.  We have had over 120 cases to date but i8t seems to be getting better as we only have had 11 new cases this week.  The government and some NGO's have been helping us with drugs to treat and working with the villages to bring soap and clean water supplies.  We are thankful for that.

Today was Julia's last day of work.  She leaves tomorrow for Harare and Victoria Falls and then home to Australia on Thursday.  She has been a big help to us and very friendly and fun to be around.

Megan has been here for the last 2 weeks working on her research and has her data collectors out getting samples.  She is running the samples in our lab and so far has almost 200 samples collected out the 400 she needs.  Julia has gone out in the villages with her some of the days.

We continue to have plenty of rain.  We were wondering what sunshine looked for awhile but we finally got a few hours of sunshine and heat this week and this morning and then this afternoon we got a big storm that hit with plenty of rain!! They were sweeping out rain that was running in my kitchen backdoor this afternoon--it looked like a flood!

I started back on the IV medication for my UTIs this week and hopefully will be able to go for a scope mid-next week if I can stay bacteria free for a day! 

Dancing to celebrate Carolyn's passing her exams


Kids support group Saturday


Tea time with the kids




Julia washing her hands to eat at the village



Tete Jeri cooking sadza for us at Batanai

Church service Sunday morning at Batanai


Sunset at Baton

My maize field at Batanai




My field of peanuts


Megan's data collectors at work
























Comments

  1. essay bestMarch 25, 2017 at 6:30 AM

    Very nice blog with beautiful concept. Miss Julie was her on vacations, still he came on the medical visit just to look after the poor patients free or cost.

    ReplyDelete

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