Road trip.

The district hospital - "a baby friendly hospital"

Yesterday evening we packed up our pharmacy and diagnostic supplies to prepare for our village trip today.  Since we are trying to coordinate our work here in Kasese with the district's healthcare system, we invited the District Medical Officer to come with us to the village of Mtambalika, where we were to hold our clinic today. Ray and I left at 0700 to drive to the district hospital to pick her up. 

 Come to find out there is a current DMO, Peter, who will be departing before August 31 to begin a resid-

ACK!! I'm sitting in the dark typing and a huge ant just crawled across my computer screen. Dead now. Must have snuck in while my net was tied up.

Beatrice and Peter, both Malawi educated physicians.

ency in surgery. He is being replaced by Beatrice, who just completed her internship. The drive to the hospital was much further than I expected and once there they both decided to accompany us. 

 We didn't get back to the compound to retrieve everyone else until almost 10:00. The drive to the village was quite rough as once you get off the M-1, the dirt roads are treacherous. There was quite a line of people waiting for us when we arrived and it only seemed to get longer as time passed. 

The lines of patients when we finally arrived.

It got to the point that Peter and Beatrice were both seeing patients to help out. 

Ray coaxing a child onto the scale.  He finally bribed him with candy.

With Casey running triage, Luke, Araceli and Timeyo in the pharmacy, and Ray doing some of everything we saw 170 patients by the time we left around 5:00 pm

Casey triaging as fast as she can.

Through the course of the day we were able to compile a list of medications that are needed but not currently in our inventory.  Sadly, the clinic here is also out of stock. Today most of our patients were treated for only minor ailments and we headed back to the house exhausted but good.