On the Daily

So what do I do every day? That is something that has been somewhat of an obstacle so far. The planned roles for me were dependent on the new clinic facility being open, which it is not. The current clinic has only two exam rooms - so it is actually a bit overstaffed currently with two volunteer nurses and three regular nurses. Although since no one plans ahead in Kabala - including who will be at work the next day - it has been working out. I have shadowed Theresa's pre-natal exams to get a sense of how the clinic works. I might keep working with her doing health education with patients on a one to one kind of basis during their exams with her. I have undertaken an enormous project of unpacking, organizing, and cataloguing donations the clinic has received. It is difficult to understand why, but the clinic is not in the practice of unpacking and using the donations it receives. They are kept in boxes in the exam rooms or packed away in an extraordinarily musty basement. And they've been that way for years. With the help of another volunteer (a nurse from Canada who is with CITA for a year) I've unloaded quite a few boxes of musty bandaids, un-usable surgery equipment, toothbrushes, miscellaneous medicine samples and old prescriptions. There is far more than the clinic can actually hold. I'm in favor of burning much of it, but Theresa wants to keep most things.

I have also taken on grant writing sooner than planned. I've been working with a grant quite a bit - but there are some difficulties. The grant is mostly ready to submit but communication and planning are difficult to the point that I have no way of knowing if anyone wants to implement the project the grant has planned. We've in fact, already won another grant to do the project, but no one is doing big parts of it. The project involves a lot of education regarding health rights, which I could have come prepared to do, but didn't.

So my days are spent at the clinic in a combination of observing, considering grants, unloading, and other miscellaneous jobs.

The harder part is the evening. Which starts at 4 or earlier. People's work days end early in Kabala. If I haven't already, I will search out internet (I can only access it until about 5pm). After 7, reading and writing become significantly more difficult with no electricity, but unless I'm passing the time with some of the other 8 English speaking people in town, that's about all there is to do. I try to stay up until at least 10, but I'm often asleep by 9. There's random activities I get drawn into by Theresa's kids as well such as 'seeing a film in town*' or heading to the chief's house to watch CNN. *Seeing a film involves going to a building in the market and sitting down in front of your choice of 1 of 6 Nigerian soap operas or terrible American action movies. The play them continuously on a loop. The first time I went I saw the last half of a later Wesley Snipes movie and the first half of Half Past Dead.