Night Shift- Carlie

June 5, 2012

I am at the hospital with Athens tonight on our 4^th night in a row of working nights.  I am not a big fan of working nights, and hopefully after this month we can get on a different schedule.  We are sitting together right now in the maternity ward nursing room, if you can call it a room.  It has four walls and a door but the walls only go up about half way so you can still hear everything that is going on around you.  There is one chair in the room and a long rectangular table that all the nurses here use as a bed.  The “table is breaking in the middle, so Athens and I have to sit on each end so not to break it.  Joe the nurse that is working with Athens is over in Urgent hanging out with the nurses I work with. Night shift here is nothing like night shift at home.  They don’t care if you sleep here on the job as long as you give meds when they are do.  Most of my patients that are in Urgent sleep outside on the ground at night cause its cooler.  So  it makes finding them in the dark to give meds difficult.  I am still trying to learn French, and its still difficult at times trying to communicate with others.  The other nurses are nice, and at times we can communicate with a mixture of French, English and charades. I have gotten quite good at acting things out!  In stead of getting frustrated at not understanding each other, most of the time we end up laughing over the fact that we cant seem to communicate. 

When we get off at 7 am we usually start walking back towards home instead of waiting on someone to come pick us up.  And I have found that even though I am exhausted from working all night, I still enjoy the walk back home.  The children here seem to have a six sense of knowing when you are coming down the road.  They start yelling, “Nasara” which means foreigner.  They get so excited when they see us coming.  And then before you know it your surrounded by 20 kids wanting to shake your hand.  Athens and I are beginning to believe that the kids communicate here with some sort of drum system because all the way home kids come out to shake our hands as if they were warned we are coming.  I have even stopped minding the small sticky and or wet hands that reach out to shake my own on the way home.  There happy smiles makes me not to dwell on the different germs I have come in contact with.

Athens and I have been able to help with two different births so far this week.  And birthing in Africa is nothing like birthing in America.  I have been told that the Bere Adventist hospital is the best hospital in Chad, which to me is scary.   I have always associated hospitals with being clean, but I guess African hospitals didn’t get the memo.  I knew before I came out here that it wouldn’t be anything like hospitals back home, but it still was a shock.  The hospital is dirty, and crowded.  When people come to the hospital it becomes a family vacation.  At night family members will sleep at the bedside or out side on mats.  It can make it difficult at times trying to figure out who is the patient and who is family.  The patients don’t wear gown, or have any sort of identification on them.  I found out real fast that relying on the fact that they must be a patient because they are lying in a hospital bed dose not mean a thing.  Apparently any bed is up for grabs if its not being used by a patient.  I have gotten used to the bats flying above me at night at the hospital, but am having trouble ignoring the bugs.    Africa tends to make its bugs supersized.  No bug should get that big.  I don’t know if I will ever be comfortable with the bugs and spiders here.  The two births we helped with went well.  One of the babies came out with the cord wrapped around its neck, and wasn’t crying when it was born.  But after hanging the baby upside down by its feet and giving it a couple slaps on its back got it crying in not time.  None of the births I watched during my cliniclas prepared me for births in Africa.  The blood drips off the birthing beds onto the floor, which makes it a tricky trying not slip in it, let alone just step in it.  After the birth we throw bleach water onto the floors and sweep it out side.  The birthing room is small and hot.  But you can’t keep the door opened because people we trying  and peer in.  I try and not look to closely to the walls because if I do I can see splattered blood that was never washed off.  I would love to give this place a good cleaning but that would be hopeless.  So instead I am learning to ignore the dirt, and filth.  Soon it won’t bother me at all.

The church here in Bendale which is where we live is a small one day church.  There is a roof, dirt floors , an dirt walls that go up about half way.  The first time I saw it I thought it wasn’t yet completed but I latter learned that they considered it done.  Church starts at 8 o’clock on Sabbath and goes to about 11:30 or 12.  They start out with singing, then a nature story, singing, children story, singing  then a bible lesson story, singing and then finally the sermon with more singing after.  The children sit on mats on the floor at the back of the church while the rest of us sit on benches.  I have come to hate those benches with a passion.  I never knew that sitting could cause so much pain.  There is defiantly no sleeping in church with those hard benches.  It makes me think that we would have less people sleeping in church back home if they decided to replace our nice cushioned pew for some hard wooden benches with no back support.  But when we sit for 3 plus hour on the those benches, it comes to the point where you cant concentrate on the sermon but only on the pain that is radiating from your backside up your back.  I feel like a child  who is constantly fidgeting and shifting instead of sitting still. I try to focus on the sermon but after awhile trying to relieve the pain in my butt becomes my number one focus.

The market here is another experience altogether. The market is dirty with lots of trash laying on the ground. The market consist of people sitting on mats on the ground and trying to sell whatever they have on their mat.  It could be grains, beans, peanut oil, some sort of leaves, onions, garlic and bowels of different colored flour.  The few actual stores have a little more to offer but not much.  Nothing that they sell reminds me of home. When you buy something like flour here they just dip their hands in the flour bowl that is sitting on their map and scoop it into a plastic bag.  People are allowed to touch food even though they don’t buy it.  After I found that out I wasn’t so worried about the merchant’s hands touching my flour, I started to wonder about all the other people who had reached their hands into the bowl.  The one comfort from home is the peanut butter they make here.  I eat the Adams Natural peanut butter but Africa peanut butter is better.  There is nothing like fresh made peanut butter.  What they do here is roast the peanuts in the sand, then grind them up.  It is completely natural with no added sugar.  I don’t know how I will be able to eat any peanut butter from home, now that I have eaten fresh peanut butter.

Gary and Wendy got back home today after a week in the capital.  We are still living in there guest room but we hope to be able to move out to the nutrition center in about a week.  I will miss the running water, and toilet at their house.  The nutrition center has a well which will be or drinking and showering water.  Or toilet consists of mud brick walls, a hole in the ground no door.  That should be an interesting experience…..  I hope tomorrow that Gary will be able to teach us to ride the motorcycle or “moto” as they are called here.  Either you walk, ride a donkey/horse or ride a motorcycle in Chad.  You rarely see any cars.  I think I have seen three cars since I have been here, and one of them is owned by the hospital.  Bronwin who is from South Africa/England has been helping us out with getting us to and from the hospital.  But it will be nice to have our own set of wheels and not depend on everyone else.  But I will miss the three of us on a bike together!!  We have a lot of fun trying not to fall in the puddles which are more like small lakes in the road.