First Procedure!

I ended up going to the hospital this morning and so I’ll go to the orphanage later this week. I was in Minor all morning and I actually got to do a lot of things. Thanks to the wonderful advice from my Dad and Luke, I found a way to wear the sterile latex gloves by wearing my latex-free gloves underneath. It worked like a charm! There were a couple of people in who needed dressing changes and I got to help with that and with changing some catheters. Then, a man came in who was badly beat up from a motorbike accident. There are a lot of motorcycles here and they are even a form of public transportation (you can jump on the back of one and go wherever you need to for only about 80 cents). I have yet to see anyone wearing a helmet on these, which is absolutely stunning considering how people drive here. So, not surprisingly, we get a lot of men who have been in accidents at the hospital. This man needed stitches on the side and top of his head. Angie and I watched the doctor do the first couple on the side of his face then she was able to do the last couple. This was her first time suturing. Then it was my turn to try and do the stitches on top of his head. I got everything ready and started stitching, but the skin on the top of his head was so thick that I couldn’t get the needle to go through and I was hesitant to push any harder than I was for fear that I would hurt him further (even though the area was numbed). So, I tried a couple separate times before the doctor took back over. He said that it was some of the toughest skin he had done and it was a real struggle for even him to do the stitches. It was probably not a good one to start on for my first try, but at least I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to do it next time, or on my own if I really needed to. We then finished cleaning the man up and dressing most of his wounds. At this point, we run out of sterile gauze (which is what we clean and dress everything with) and there didn’t seem to be any in the whole hospital, which was very frustrating. The nurses didn’t really care and even said to Chelsea, “You just need to accept that there is none and stop looking.” They were perfectly fine with sending away patients that needed help getting cleaned up or stitched. They just said that they told the patients to just come back tomorrow. This was frustrating for us to see and so we ended up leaving pretty shortly after.

So, when we got back home, Chelsea, Alexa and I decided to do laundry. This was a Much bigger ordeal than we thought it would be. It takes so long to wash everything by hand! About 3 items in, we started sorting our clothes into things we really needed washed, and things we could live without getting washed. It was still a lot of stuff to wash though. Then, we had to hang everything on the line to dry. I’ve never been more grateful for washing machines and dryers back home! We then relaxed out by the pool for awhile. A lot of us read in our down time, and I’ve already gone through 3 books

The food here is something that I could do without. Every night, its white rice or pasta and some sort of stew with chicken or mystery meat over the top. A lot of time there is potatoes in the stew. I’m very sick of starches. I looked at a break-down of the Kenyan diet in a newspaper here and it said that 77% of their diet is carbohydrates. I can really believe that. The meat is definitely not the farm grown quality that we are used to. It’s all edible, but it’s just a little bland and we are all getting sick of not having much variety.

Tonight we are hanging out at Café Mocha again. It’s definitely one of our favorite places to relax. Quite a few people are going to the hospital tonight, but since it gets overwhelming for the patients when there are so many of us (and because there isn't anything to do when there are a ton of us there), I'm taking my turn and sitting this night out. Tomorrow I'll get to hang out with the kids again! That is definitely my favorite part so far.