Greetings all!

First off I’m sorry that this post is coming so late in the week but I had my official site visit Wednesday and subsequently spent the first half of the week stressing out and trying to get things ready/making sure people didn’t flake out on me. I find that you have to repeat things multiple times on multiple days if you want people to remember appointments or meetings. Thus why even after I had told him two weeks ago, again one week ago, again last Sunday, and on Monday, on Tuesday (the day before site visit) my supervisor said and I quote “Your supervisor is coming tomorrow?!” But even with the short-term memory loss issues my colleagues face, all the prep work paid off because Sylvie (a.k.a my boss) had a great visit!

So how it works is, the APCD (head person for each sector) every three or four months will drive through the country and visit all the volunteers for their particular program and do research on new posts. My APCD is named Sylvie and she came through the West and Western Adamaoua this past week. She got into town at about 10 and we went strait to the Sous Prefecture to do protocol with all the important government officials. Only problem was that when we got there, there was no protocol to be had because all the big wigs were out of the office (even though I had gone and talked to them and made appointments ahead of time). It wasn’t exactly how I had hoped to kick things off, but it really wasn’t that big of a deal either and Sylvie didn’t seem to care too much.

Next up was a visit to the hospital where we had a meeting with Bernadette (my counterpart) and Hamajida (my supervisor). We talked about the work I was doing at the health center and what kind of assessments we had made together over the past couple of months. Everything went well and Sylvie seemed to be satisfied with things.

It was around noon when we left the hospital so we decided to grab some of Bankim’s famous grilled fish and took a break for lunch. After lunch we went to a meeting I had setup with Abdulie (president of MBOSCUDA) to talk about what kind of things we had been doing together. We talked for about an hour and all parties involved seemed really pumped about the collaboration. It was definitely the high point of the visit. I think it helps that Abdulie is such a passionate advocate for his people. Once he gets going you just can’t help but want to work with him!

We ended the day with a visit to my Wednesday community group where I gave a quick presentation on water sources and did a community mapping activity. It was short and sweet, and nothing to get super excited about, but I got my point across and proved that I am in fact capable of doing my job, which was the objective. All in all the visit was a big success. The boss is happy so I’m happy J

Other points of interest on the work front this week included, seven year old vs. snake, and first time mommy vs. health center staff. Snake first; so I went in on Thursday just to say hello and thank everyone for helping me out with site visit the day before, but when I got there I found everyone huddled around the door to the last room at the end of the ward. I made my way down there and immediately saw what we were all staring at. It was seven-year-old boy who had been bitten by a snake in his concession. It happened 3 days ago, but instead of coming right into the hospital the family waited and used some traditional medicine on it which ended up getting it infected and caused it to spread like whoa! The good news is that they put the kid on meds and he’s coming in every day to get the bandage changed so he should be fine in a couple of weeks, but its frustrating to know that the worst of it could have been avoided had they come straight in.

The other run in was similarly frustrating. It was Friday and I was helping out with the CPN visits (prenatal consultations) when we got a first time mother that came in refusing to get vaccinated. My initial thought was, well maybe she doesn’t know what it’s for so we tried to explain that these vaccinations are important to have a strong healthy baby… nothing. Then we asked her why she was refusing and from what I gathered her husband had forbidden her from having a needle pierce her skin. I should back up for a second; a lot of people in the Grand North practice scarification as part of their cultural tradition and once you do that you’re not technically supposed to let anything else scar your skin. Now from how it was explained to me most people take this to mean that you can’t perform the actual scaring ceremony more then once, but some people take it to the extreme, thus why this new mother wouldn’t let the nurses get more then a foot away from her with a syringe in their hand. For me the right thing to do is easy to see, but at the end of the day you can’t force a patient to receive treatment so that was that.

Other Random Things To Report

My rain dance paid off because the rainy season started Sunday. This is great news because the temperature has cooled off and the dust is for the most part gone. The only draw back is that rain = termite swarms, and at night they come out in full force. Sadly I learned that lesson the hard way when I left my door open and had my kitchen invaded.

This week has also been marked by power outages up the wazoo. I’m not really sure what their cause is but the power has gone out just about every night this week and a couple of the days. I am by no means complaining, cause some other volunteers never have electricity, but it has been the talk of the town as of late.

Finally, I got a surprise phone call at the beginning off the week with news that my college roommate is engaged! I’m very excited for her, as are all of my neighbors. How do my neighbors know you ask? Well when the power is out at night it’s pretty quite and when I found out I may or may not have done a little excited high pitch squealing, and my neighbors might have thought I was in trouble and they may have all come over to make sure I wasn’t being attacked. Anyways, everyone in my neighborhood is very happy for you Krista!