The homesickness hit today. I blame mom’s email about pizza and Dairy Queen (sometimes when I want to torture myself I think about the foods I miss, which is pretty much everything but rice). This morning was pretty uneventful. We were in the clinic and went over to the hospital to see them anesthetize the little boy and cut off the necrosed skin. We also saw a man who had an accident on his moto (yet another reason not to ride one). There was also a pair of very adorable twin babies in the clinic. I’m noticing more and more though how much it bothers me that the patients are permitted very little dignity and have no choice in their healthcare. In fact they are rarely informed of what is being done to them. There seems to be no need here to ask a patient’s permission before coming in physical contact, no offering to answer questions, the doctors seem to hardly look the patients in the eye. I try not to look angry and to not let it bother me, but well it does. Perhaps if I were to stay here and work and perhaps if I were able to gain more respect, then perhaps I would bring it to their attention that doctors are here to provide a service to patients and that patients should be informed and given a choice.
Enough of that (or I’ll get bothered again). After lunch we were back at the clinic, but there wasn’t anything to do, so we stayed in the office until Tolo was ready to go to the market so Liz could buy her fabric today. When we went Liz has a hard time making up her mind (there are lots of pretty and very different choices). She finally settled on one with a maple leaf pattern and I wound up buy another set of fabric with the united women of Africa organization’s emblem on it (I think I’ll make a blanket out of it when I come home). After that we were back at the clinic and after waiting a while and killing more time one of the doctors gave us a translation assignment. It was a series of mock interviews that a qualitative analyst will use to assess the ethics of the studies being performed at the center. We translated one of the interviews before it was time to go home for the day; it’s actually a little difficult to translate because so many of their idioms are different and don’t translate well into English. On the drive home we passed some people filling in the ruts in the road (made by the rain) with dirt (or sand more likely) and Badry mentioned that the town hopes to one day in the relatively near future get concrete streets (though it might take a while, the town is not very high on any government lists). Tonight I got lucky and dinner was their version of spaghetti (which I really like); it was great, I was starving.
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