week 7. last reinforcements

The first week of August started with really good news for the Health project, as Luis told us a few days ago. On Monday Luis, Gasto and I went with Saumu and her mother to Arusha, and we couldn’t imagine a better place for her to stay.

On Tuesday, more good news. With a day of delay and some problems to get to Moshi, Julia and Hanna finally join the team. Julia is a pharmacist and Hanna a medical student. Both caught upimmediately the work rate and started preparing their seminars, Julia about home hygiene and Hanna about side effects of drugs.

In the dispensary, Miranda proposed the doctor one new activity: measure blood pressure to all patients. During the medical caravans, many people had high blood pressure values, and we want to know if this is a real problem in Msitu or if it was because of the situation (white coat hypertension). The doctor liked the idea, so he brought a sphygmomanometer to the dispensary and Junior is now an expert in taking blood pressure.

In Msitu, they don’t take notice about chronic diseases as diabetes and hypertension, because usually there are more urgent problems, and get a long-term treatment is complicate. But we would like to focus a little on these diseases, as they are important problems that can reduce life quality to many people, especially elderly.

Parra and I were doing research in our topics: HIVand gynecology/ obstetrics. Parra is going to be the only one not giving a seminar to the Hope group. His topic is HIV and we thought it was too complicated to be given in two days. That is why he is searching for programs that could give the mamas a more complete training on this important issue. WAZO is a local NGO with a training program that seems to be very interesting. We hope that working with them would be possible.

Jaime was doing office work, the report of his seminar and another report that collects all the information that we have about the dispensary.

This week seminar was done by Luis, about pneumonia. New subject for the mamas, in which they showed a lot of interest and curiosity. Zara, the translator, was really enthusiastic about all the new stuff she had learned.

Things have been moving forward and there is little time left. Sometimes, everything goes really well, but others we find obstacles that make us go backward and seek new ways (hospitals that close their doors to us, unanswered e-mails, lack of time and resources,…). Luis has been working hard to restructure the project again and again, whit Iago’s help. It is important not to lose sight of the objective and use the resources in the right way. Sometimes projects reach end well and others they don’t, what seems clear is that we can not give up.