Our last few days

On Sunday Prossy took us to her village, 5 miles outside of Masaka.  Incidentally, this is the closest village to Masaka. The people of this village must walk to the hospital, but their commute is far less than many other labouring women. We first went to visit Prossy's foster family. She was warmly greeted by her 90 year old jaja (grandmother) and her uncle. They welcomed us into their home and gave us pop and showed us photos of their family- Catholics who are closely related to one of the Uganda martyrs.

Prossy and her Jaja and Uncle

We then walked to visit the Good Samaritan School for the Deaf.  This boarding school houses and educates 98 deaf children from all over central Uganda. Most of the children come from poor families and only 5 pay tuition. The government provides only $80 of funding every other year. The rest is fundraised. Children sleep in bunkbeds two per mattress and their green uniforms are splitting at the seams.Despite this they are all fluent in sign language, can read and write and do math.

Good Samaritan School for the Deaf

Yesterday we spent on the antenatal (prenatal) ward. We observed a group HIV pre-test counselling session (albeit in Lugandan) and then we proceeded to draw blood from all 55 women who attended the session. This was great practice as between us we had only done venipuncture 4 times since we learned the skill in second year. We then learned how the point of care testing for HIV and syphillis is performed. 3/55 women tested positive for HIV, none for syphillis. Somehow, being witness to these pending diagnoses was more upsetting than working with someone who already knows their HIV+ status. We reconfirmed the 3 positives using a second kind of test- they were all true positives. The ramifications of this are huge- it is likely that these women will realize upon diagnoses that their husbands have cheated and infected them. When (if) they tell their husbands they will likely blame them and may beat them. If they already have children and this was their first test they will worry about their children's status and the status of the unborn.

Point of care HIV testing

Children at HIV Cares playing with donated dolls while their parents wait for treatment

We also got to see how a malaria blood smear is done and visualized the malaria parasites under the microscope.

Today started out very slow and boring. We had no power, no running water and no IV fluid for the majority of the day so it was probably just as well that it was slow. We did each attend a birth and Carolyn resuscitated the third baby that was born. One really scary happening was that a mom brought her baby from the nursery into labour and delivery after realizing its cord tie (a glove collar) had come undone and the baby was bleeding. This is very scary because babies only have about 400ml of blood. Thankfully Carolyn quickly retied and Prossy ran to provide an IV.

Tomorrow is our last day on the wards!