Urafiki Health Centre (Stouffville-Igoma Partnership)
September 21, 2009 Journal Entry
Day spent at Urafiki Health Centre. This morning we had a slow start, which was nice - a little laid back and then it was off to Urafiki. Edah, the Head Nurse, gave us a tour, but our first stop was with an expectant Mom who they wanted us to examine for input. The difference of culture and medical worlds begins! While we felt she was not even yet in active labour, they were concerned that she was not progressing and so she ended up being sent out for ceasarian section at the hospital in Bungando (about 40 minutes by car). It can often be challenging merging the two worlds of experience, culture and medicine and this was our first face to face with this. It's a difficult complexity to explain but a very real one.
The Urafiki Centre has some very good resources in the lab available and the staff who work there. Each person is trained on site at Urafiki and while their training is very little compared to our education system for Nursing in Ontario, it is something and they appear to take their responsibilities very seriously and are committed to learning. I would like to have many conversations to learn from Dr. Mukulla, a Tanzanian Doctor who works at Urafiki. He spent some time this afternoon, talking with a few of us about malaria and a parasitic infections.
The afternoon was spent preparing for Clinic days - unpacking the PTP’s and bags of supplies. I couldn’t help but think how exciting it must be for the Clinic staff to see the supplies that are donated. I trust that we explained as much as we could and that they understood. While some of the staff speak some english, their comprehension is quite limited...similar to me with french!
Below is me with some of the neighbouring children around the Urafiki Health Centre. I'm holding one of the Physician Travel Packs (PTP's) filled with medicine that we brought from Canada (via Health Partners International).
This is just a sampling of the meds that were unpacked and repacked every day for clinics. We ended up purchasing many meds in Tanzania as well, as we so often came close to running out (and some days we did with certain drugs).
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