Company!
J & D, graduate-level pharmacy students from a college in Virginia, arrived Wednesday afternoon. They’ll be volunteering here for a month, and two of their classmates will arrive when they leave. It’s great to have company in the house, and I’ve enjoyed being able to show them around the clinic and town and explaining IMCI and the clinic’s “5 Star” programs. Cultural exchange is fabulous, but being able to bond over shared fondness for MadTV skits and Macklemore’s “Same Love” is a welcome addition to life in Monte Plata.
One of the projects we took on, at Abdias’ suggestion, was to make a list of the donated medications in the clinic’s storeroom, which are all in English, and to translate the directions and warnings into Spanish so that they can be used. Several were nearing or past their expiration dates, which might be due in part to their inaccessibility (untranslated and not well organized in the storage area). We finished the chart, and will check the storage room again on Monday to make sure we didn’t miss any before printing it out on letterhead and explaining it to the doctors and pharmacist (who isn’t actually certified in pharmacy, just trained to dispense meds, according to Abdias). After seeing the state of the storage area, I’d also like to spend a few hours with J & D to rearrange where everything is stored to make all of the medications and supplies easier to find. Currently, the prescription medications are in the front, the stationary is all sort of together on the righthand side, and most of the cleaning supplies are together near the back, but everything else is in boxes in a jumbled mess in the back.
Role-playing IMCI scenarios with Dra. Mansueto
I served as translator for J & D during these exercises, which was especially challenging because of all the medical terminology, but the doctor was good about pausing when I motioned to let me translate and using gestures to help explain the meanings of words. I’ve never appreciated the Latin roots of all those words more! (The only thing that threw me off was “amigdalitis,” which has nothing to do with the amygdala. Apparently in Spanish “las amigdalas” are your tonsils (though “la amigdala” can also refer to the amygdala–go figure).
Teresa visited on Thursday, and we spoke about the plans for the survey I’ve been doing. I decided to make a few final revisions before continuing with the rest of the interviews, which will be in both the Monte Plata and Santo Domingo clinics. I’m still on the fence about training other people to administer the survey, though, since it might skew the results. Having other administering the survey would mean we could get much more data in a shorter period of time, though, which would be great. The most available labor for this task would be the high school volunteers, but I’m not sure how reliable they would be.
Teresa also told me that we (Jillian, Derek, Abdias and I) will all be going to the Santo Domingo clinic for Thursday and Friday, which means we’ll have the weekend to travel. Beaches/adventure here we come!
Lazy Sunday
It’s been raining on and off all day, basically a continuation of the storm that started yesterday evening, so we didn’t leave the house much today. However, we had two bags of instant oatmeal, so I made a batch of some guiltless oatmeal cookies this afternoon. They only had 3 ingredients–banana, oatmeal and raisins–and took 20 minutes from start to finish. I followed the instructions posted here. In the late afternoon, D went for a run & to shoot hoops with the teens in the sports building across the street, and J & I went on a quest to find hot sauce or chiles before it started pouring again. We found several colmados (corner stores) that were open, but none sold anything spicy. Our salsa shall remain gringa-mild for another day. And we got caught in the rain for the last 5 minutes of our walk, so we entered the house soaked.
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