Umekate!
They weren’t kidding when they said it gets cold over here. When the sun goes down, the temperature goes down to near freezing, and when you factor in the wind-chill and the fact that houses here have little to no insulation, it’s no surprise then that you find everyone hovering around the heater. Luckily, the temperature is quite comfortable during the day (mid-60s), and so there was no deterring Lauren and me from our stream of meetings this week.
Thanks to Stephanie and Michelle (our mentors)’s hard work and awesome networking skills, Lauren and I had ample opportunity to practice our presentation skills and flash our sparkling smiles. After meeting with representatives from ICAP on Tuesday, we headed out to Good Shepherd Hospital (a rural clinic) to present our technologies to the physicians there on Wednesday and met with the director of the Clinton Health Access Initiative branch in Mbabane on Thursday. We left one of our pediatric transilluminators at Good Shepherd (making the 3hr journey well worthwhile despite only being able to meet with the clinician for 15min) and will be going back in a couple of weeks to see how the clinicians liked using it. We also found collaborators for our transport system at the Clinton Foundation and are looking forward to working with them.
After our presentation on Tuesday, we were invited to attend a meeting today to discuss ways to improve pill counting and adherence. Unfortunately, a combination of the flu and World Cup mania has swept through Mbabane and so most of the people who were supposed to attend (including representatives from the Ministry of Health) were unable to make it. Still, Médecine Sans Frontières (MSF), better known in the States as Doctors Without Borders, and ICAP kept the party going and allowed us to unveil our newly customized, though much less colorful, adherence charts. Luckily, both parties seemed to think that our charts looked promising and its potential more than compensated for our unfortunate (how did I pass kindergarten? Oh wait, I never went!) cutting and pasting skills. ICAP has kindly offered to let us use their color printer and laminator, and has invited us to a couple of their clinics to see how the charts hold up in the field next week.
Dr. Oden is scheduled to arrive on Monday, and if all goes as planned, we will be presenting again at a meeting set up by none other than our mentor Michelle. As a final note before I go tune in to the US-Slovenia game, as you can see from our travels thus far, there are only two rules here in Swaziland: everything is on Swazi time (aka never on time) and expect the unexpected.
Here’s a picture taken when we visited House On Fire last weekend.
Cheers!