Okay so far I've posted about my new African life over the past two weeks, but that's really only half of what I'm up to around here. I spend my weekday mornings working at Margret Marquart Catholic Hospital. I mentioned it in one of my earliest posts, which you can find on the first page of this blog, so I won't go into the details of the setup there. Instead, I'll try to catch up on what I've left out for the past two weeks.
I intern in the HIV and surgical wards. In the HIV ward I have the opportunity to shadow the physicians when they see patients for their regular checkups (pregnant women are screened as a precaution), and data entry. Although the data entry is mostly boring busy work, it lends a lot of inside information about how patients are being treated for their conditions. Doing that work feels really rewarding too, since it basically seems like no one has done any work on their database in ages.
About a week into working on this, the monitor on the only computer they've got in the ward breaks. It's taking a while for them to get replacement parts, so I've happily moved on to the surgical ward.