To the press!
To stay true to Rice’s motto (“Work hard, play hard!), let’s start with a little bit of football.
Did anyone watch the US-Algeria game? What a match! Dr. Stephanie and I went to the Mbabane Club to watch the match. All of the American ex-pats were forced to crowd around a small TV in the corner of the room…the Brits beat us to the 2 big screens. But in this case, size doesn’t matter! When Donovan (aka Mr. Clutch) scored the game winner in the 91st minute, there was no question which group of fans was more enthusiastic. And plus, only one team sits atop the Group C standings and that team is the USA! Unfortunately, next up is Africa’s last hope in the World Cup (Ghana), provided Cote d’Ivoire doesn’t pull up an absolute shocker.
Now for a quick recap of our week…
Despite the fact that Dr. Oden (one of our faculty mentors) literally whizzed through Swaziland, we were able to pack quite a bit into her 26hr visit. Just hours after arriving in Swaziland, Dr. Oden was able to join us when we presented our technologies in front of a handful of public health officials, including representatives from the Ministry, the National Pharmacy, the CDC/PEPFAR, SNAP, PSI, FLAS, andd URC (to be honest, I couldn’t tell you what all of these acronyms stand for). There was quite a bit of interest in our technologies, and we even had the Head Pharmacist thinking about the “big picture” for our dosing syringes.
Later in the evening, we got a taste of authentic Swazi food (a recount of this experience to come!). If any of you ever make your way over here, I highly recommend visiting a restaurant called eDladleni in the Ezulwini Valley. The menu included wild honey (and honeycomb!), fried bananas, mealie bread, pap with corn, yams, stir fried vegetables, chicken in peanut sauce, rabbit, beef fillet with onions and mushrooms, homemade ice cream, and chocolate cake. Everything was absolutely delicious and I am really looking forward to making my way out there before I leave.
The next morning, we made a pit stop in Manzini before sending Dr. Oden off to Lesotho so that we could present the Global Focus Microscope and the DBS Transport System to Dr. Sukati, the head of the National Clinical Laboratory Services. The meeting was more of a formality (procedure is everything in Swaziland), but he seemed quite interested in adapting both technologies for use in Swaziland.
Last week, I mentioned that the very diverse staff at ICAP (awesome accents!) was interested in collaborating with us on implementing the adherence charts. Well, it turns out that we may have underestimated their excitement! When we met with ICAP again this week, we were quite surprised to learn that they were planning on printing around 600 copies of these charts, which was contrary to our original plan of evaluating the current charts this summer and modifying them as needed. Fortunately, petty politics will keep us from jumping the gun (the Ministry needs to approve these charts first). In the meantime, we will continue modifying our charts as we visit various clinics, and with any luck, we will have a somewhat polished product by the end of the summer.