Hello again, world!
I’ve been neglecting my blogging duties this week.
Things have finally picked up on the work end. One morning, I went door-to-door with a couple of the high school volunteers (who were assigned to the clinic for community service hours), and got to see a bit more of the town. In the morning, it’s mostly the elderly at home, either alone or minding their grandchildren.
This was one of the first women we spoke with, who really was much better at explaining the importance of hygiene than the HS kids. Every so often, she stopped talking to sell a ladleful of beans.
On the walk back to the clinic, the volunteers stopped to talk to a couple friends on a motorcycle. I’m not 100% sure why this photo always makes me laugh.
After taking some initiative and doing research on the project Teresa (the Project Hope Country Director, my supervisor, and the clinic staff’s Big Boss) had emailed me about a few weeks back, I wrote up a brief outlining the basics of setting up a Mobile Health arm at the clinic and sent it to her and Orlando, her second-in-command, who’s in Monte Plata twice a week, compared to Teresa’s sporadic visits. When I didn’t have feedback, I asked Teresa if there was something else I could work on in the meantime, and she asked me to create a survey to assess where patients receive health information, what kind of health messages they’ve received recently, and what information doesn’t seem to be reaching them. I put together the survey, adding questions about what they’d like to receive via text (and whether they have a cellphone) and a few questions about behavior relevant to the major public health target areas here–breastfeeding, dengue prevention and hand-washing. When Teresa visited on Thursday, we sat down to go over the survey, as well as to talk about the work I can be doing here. We reworked a few parts of it to more clearly collect useful data and added more answer choices to some questions to reflect the messaging that’s going out from the public health authorities. Afterwords, I think she had a stern talk with some of the staff about how they should be engaging more with patients in the waiting area instead of sitting around, and involving me in higher-level stuff than sorting the ticket numbers and other really basic tasks, but I made myself scarce while she lectured people.
I spent the rest of afternoon revising the survey, and gave a copy to the community health people for feedback. However, around 4pm the heavy rain turned to hail, which was a BIG deal. There were only a couple patients left in the clinic, since most people come in the morning, so I guess it was okay that most of the staff flocked to the windows and doors to marvel at the sizable pellets of ice falling from the sky. A couple people ran outside to collect some, and held out handfuls of hailstones for pictures (to be texted to relatives and friends). Reina took a couple handfuls around the clinic to show to the kids, most of whom had never seen hail because the last hailstorm here was about five years ago.
On Friday morning, I got some good survey feedback, both from Reina and from testing it out with a few patients. I reworked the problem questions, had Reina and Rosi look it over again, changed the word for cellphone to the term more people will recognize (“celular” instead of “movil”), and now it’s ready to go. There were hardly any patients on Friday afternoon, so I’ll be starting to administer it tomorrow (Monday) morning. I shifted gears back to the technical part of the mobile health work for the afternoon, trying to explain how the platform works and what we need to set it up. All of that was in the fairly short brief I had sent to Teresa and Orlando, but it seems neither of them really read through it because the tech seemed to be over their head.
Other blog-worthy notes:
– I’ve been having major laptop difficulties. Sometimes it turns on, sometimes it refuses to. Resetting the SMC might’ve helped a couple times, but most of the time it doesn’t. So I just cross my fingers and keep trying. Also, the internet sometimes goes down briefly, and was down all evening on Thursday because of the storm. Thankfully, because of the clinic’s generator, I still had electricity–there was a blackout til 10pm, which is a relatively long time even by Dominican standards.
– A med student who had been volunteering at the Herrera clinic is at the Monte Plata clinic for the next two months. This is great because he, too, has nothing to do on evenings and weekends. We’ve been spending a lot of time together, and it’s great to be able to walk around town without having to invite myself to accompany Berkys.
– There will be 2 US students (I think studying pharmacy?) coming on Thursday, so I won’t have the house to myself much longer. Teresa is also coming back up at some point with a corporate volunteer (from Pfizer I think), and they will also be staying here. All beds will be occupied! And Aundelina will be cooking for us again while the other students are here. I’m looking forward to more of this:
One of the lunches Aundelina made us. On the left is that passionfruit juice I mentioned previously. Also note the tostones. MMMMmmmm.
– Last night I saw two huge spiders in the house (~4 inches in diameter). I considered trapping them and putting them outside, where they can eat bugs and spin webs in peace, but didn’t know if they bite and was sort of scared of them regardless. I went to get the clinic’s night watchman, who came with a huge knife. One of the spiders was still in exactly the same place, on a bowl in the sink, but it ran behind the cabinets and we couldn’t get it to come back out. He covered up the gap between the cabinets and the wall with the cardboard box from my aluminum foil and a couple of paper towels, so maybe it won’t be able to get back out. The second one was no longer on its perch in the bathroom, and we couldn’t find it. The watchman assured me that this type of spider doesn’t bite–only the tarantulas bite, and there haven’t been any of those around–so I shouldn’t be afraid of it. So there are still at least two giant spiders here, but they won’t hurt me. Just freak me out. After this summer, I will have no fear of non-harmful spiders whatsoever.
-The clinic’s pharmacy sells cookies. As all pharmacies should!
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