So today started my "work" for this fall. I received my objectives to complete this fall which include making a template for a week long health camp that anyone could put on, with or without health experience. They do camps here in the summer for the orphanage kids, the city kids, and the kids in the bateys.
Side note - You'll hear me refer a lot to the bateys. These are small poor villages that are located on a farm owned by a company called Banelino. On the farm the grow bananas and rice and sell, at least the bananas, to Europe. So on this huge farm, there are 15 individual villages, some big some very small, but all very poor! This is where Dr. Garcia works in the afternoons, offering "clinics" to a different village each day of the week.
Ok so anyway, I have to develop a generic template for people to follow to be able to put on a camp to teach stuff such as basic hygiene (hand washing), anatomy, nutrition, exercise, and dental hygiene. I also have to develop modules for volunteers to follow to teach public health in the schools. There is very little public health education/knowledge here in Monte Cristi, so Orphanage Outreach has started doing this over the past 2 years and I will be making up a curriculum for volunteers to follow to be able to teach this. And last but not least, I will be figuring out how all of the volunteers in the spring (probably around 200 college students) will be used in the clinics, schools and bateys to help out and teach. So in short, I have my work cut out for me! Working 8-5 at my job might be easier :)
Sarah, a girl from Canada, who is interested in going to med school helped me this morning with planning the health camp template. Then I played with the orphanage kiddos some before lunch. After lunch we have siesta here (Brian, can we institute this when I return to work!?) and I again played with the kiddos. There are twin 3 year old girls here that are adorable. I have a picture of one so far.
After siesta, we went to Jaramillo, one of the poorer bateys. I helped the nurse vaccinate adults against tetanus and Dr. Garcia saw 30 patients in about 1 hour. He saw them sitting at a table in someone's house and they sat in a chair. The 2-3 patients I observed him see, he did not even touch. They said they had back pain and burning with urination so he gave them a prescription for a UTI. Another was a 5 month old baby who the Mom said had "gripe" which is cold/flu here and he just wrote her a prescription for "antigripal", no exam, nothing! Quite different than the states but more than what they would receive otherwise!
After dinner tonight we had movie night with the kids and watched Madagascar 2. They really enjoy movie night and this was a new movie to them!
Tomorrow I am taking Sarah to the Centro de Rehabiltation (Physical Therapy Center) and we will spend the morning there. There is a Korean nurse named Sarah that has been here for 2 years and she will be there, along with a German exchange student that just arrived so it should be a fun morning.
Miss you all! Take care and enjoy the fall weather!
P.S. I thought I would upload lots of pictures to this but I've been trying to upload one for the past 5 minutes and it still isn't up so instead I'll just put a link on here to my pictures so everyone can look at them!
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