Blood, guts and our first week in the hospital

Our first week at the hospital as expected was pretty life changing. Juliet is a fourth year medical student so is right at home there; however being a biomedical engineer puts me in a kind of limbo. Nobody understands what I do; I don’t even really know what I do so they just said to follow Juliet around. Deo dropped us at St Josephs Hospital in Soweto for our first day in the hospital which felt a bit like our first day of school. He showed us where to catch the “dolla dollas” (minivan equivalent of a bus) and we needed to catch one into town, then walk for five minutes to find another “dolla dolla” to drop us in Soweto. We were introduced to the hospital administrator Grace who has an amazing ability to never not be smiling; sometimes I even try to catch her off guard by sneaking passed her office but still, those pearly whites are showing.

Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain taunts me every morning on our way to work

The early morning commute to the hospital; that's Juliet's face between the bums

Dr Maji Maji aka Dr Water Water (She got a nickname because she drinks so much water)

Our typical morning this week has involved doing general ward rounds with Dr Dawson, who is a pretty soft spoken suave dude as well as being the hospital skux; the nurses love him. During the ward rounds he quizzes us on different disorders, not being a medical student I try and let Juliet answer the questions but sometimes he singles me out and I have to bumble my way through my answer. I now get Juliet to brief me on the disorder while he has his back turned and just regurgitate it on queue. The afternoons at the hospital have chopped and changed, we’ve progressed from watching minor surgery to major surgery over the week. We started with the removal of a fatty deposit and a circumcision in minor theatre then we watched a hysterectomy, and a caesarian section in major theatre. The power often goes out during surgery; one of the German surgical assists who is also volunteering said that when that happens he has to hold his iPhone torch up so the doctors can see what they’re doing.

Surgery selfy - no scrubs

Juliet & I have been trying to see a natural birth since we’ve been here, there are a couple of nurses from Australia & Sweden that are working in the ward and they told us they’ve witnessed them daily. However they seem to be completely eluding us. I’ve seem more naked black ladies than I’ve have had hot dinners but no natural births. One morning there was a lady whom we were sure was going to be our big break, but when we consulted the doctor he told us she was way off. There was another expectant mother in the room, and she just got up and left too. Juliet and I were sitting outside of the labour ward feeling defeated, when we heard a baby crying, and when we went into the room, there was a fresh one all wrapped up. No one was in the room, he (or she) was just chilling there, “and here’s one we prepared earlier” was running through my head. I tried to work my usual magic on the little kid, but because it was so fresh none of my crowd pleasers were working; it even yawned a couple of times, tough crowd.

Emily, Me, Juliet and Johanna in the Labour ward

The tough crowd

On Saturday to escape the heat we decided to head to the pools; the Honeybadger Hotel pool to be exact. Deo and Voice were keen to come as well so we went as a family. It was great to finally be able to regulate our own body temperature. Deo can’t swim, so he would hug the side of the pool, he also wasn’t too keen for me to teach him how to swim, and wasn’t too receptive to me pulling him off the side of the pool. There was a little local kid that had all the latest swimming gear playing in the pool, including a life jacket and waterguns; we found out through Deo that he was actually an orphan who had been adopted by a “muzungu” woman from the UK (which according to Steven is so 2007). A waterfight broke out as expected and in my haste to win, smashed the orphan boy’s water gun into pieces. The mum saw and completely flipped out at me in front of everyone at the pool, I offered to pay for it, and she said she didn’t know how much it cost, it was a real drama. I probably stayed in the pool an extra hour longer than I wanted to because I didn’t want to deal with it. Eventually I got out and she produced a receipt that confirmed it was 7100 shillings, I went into my bag and got a 10000 shilling note and gave it to her. I thought she might have produced some change but after hanging round a little too long she shot me an evil glare so I decided it wasn’t worth it.

Deo doing an underwater selfy

Deo sticking to the shallow end (that woman is in the pool in the background)

As we’ve been quite light on the pictures this week I’m going to go into the food a bit. What we’ve noticed from our experiences here is that the diet consists of mainly carbohydrates, which hasn’t been great for my no-carb diet. A typical meal has either rice or ugali (like a doughy cake made from maize flour) and beans, kuku (chicken), or nyama (meat usually beef). They also have chipsi (fried chips) and chipsi mayai (kind of like a Spanish omelette). Two times we’ve been to big celebratory events they have had the same menu, so that consisted mostly of the following:

• Pilau
• Plain rice
• Beef curry (very Indian except for the beef part)
• Beef & banana curry (they use green bananas and boil them until they are soft then mix with the curry and beef)
• Fried cabbage
• Barbequed meat
• Fruit (watermelon)

As far as drinking goes, there are four main local beers which are Safari, Serengeti, Tusker and Kilimanjaro. They have basically every type of alcohol but there is also a local spirit called Konyagi that is bottled here; it tastes like a combination of Gin & Vodka and is ruthless. When you drink Konyagi, you never sit the bottle up on the table, it always lies down; the thinking behind this is that the little Konyagi man on the bottle is cheering that he beat you if you sit it up. I bought a bottle at a bar, and mixed it for one drink, and Juliet had a sip of it and we both were ruthlessly hungover from it in the morning.

This stuff is toxic

Ugali

Juliet giving a demonstration of how to eat Ugali and nyama (meat) with your hands

Also, if you have been wondering if Tinder is big in Tanzania, wonder no more..... it's not. But there is the odd hun that pops up, I'm pretty sure she's left swiped me though.

Christmas week is going to be pretty flat out for us, the invites have already started pouring in from people wanting us to go to villages, house parties and festivals. But no doubt we’ll take heaps of photos.