Jambo! So had a really interesting time last week in the hospital working in the outpatients bit of antenatal care seeing lots of really interesting, but not always so pleasant, medicine. I was originally a bit worried about the monotony of being in the same department all week, but it actually worked in my favour as by the end of the week I was getting far more involved than I can even begin to imagine in England. The nurse/doctor/not-sure-which had me taking blood pressure (the old fashioned way obviously), examining patients, checking to hear the foetal heart, registering patients and checking for HIV and syphyllis - standard practice for all new mothers here. In fact, it is crazy how about every third mother is HIV positive and we had two new diagnosis these week (I was the first person to see the results). One was a very sad case of a 23 year old expectant mother who doesn't even know who's the father of her baby, and the other's husband was present at the diagnosis, yet refused to be tested himself. Having seen the doctor having to break the news to them (thankfully I was spared that job!), I can really understand why some people would just rather not know.

We also had another few shocking cases including a one month old baby diagnosed positive because the mother hadn't followed her treatment plan properly, and several where one partner is positive but not the other which is a bit tricky to deal with in a Catholic hospital... Another interesting incident yesterday which highlighted some of the many differences between here and home was a mother who came in with a huge bump for 28 weeks, which she claimed to be. Us two volunteers got very excited at the possibility of twins so we merrily trotted of to ultrasound with the mother where it turned out she had one horrifically deformed baby inside her. There was a slight clash between the ultrasound doctor, who didn't want to tell her as abortion is illegal here so she's going to have to give birth to it anyway so why cause her distress which she couldn't so anything about, whereas the ANC lady was all for letting her know. I felt like I'd landed in the middle of one of the ethical dilemmas I practised for med school interviews!

The final (I promise!) case I want to mention is the birth I witnessed on Thursday. This, as with everthing, also highlighted all those differences again. The main one being the complete lack of any anesthetic for the mother! and also her complete disinterest in the baby once it had been born. The sister showed it to her briefly on the way to the scales, but otherwise, the mother got up, washed, dressed and walked straight to post natal leaving me and another English girl to carry the baby through and plonk it on the bed next to her!

So all in all, quite an interesting week at the hospital!

Outside work, I had a good weekend last week at church again which was immediately proceeded by a chicken auction conducted by a man standing up at the alter waving various birds around his head. We then travelled up to a beautiful waterfall with a family I've gotten to know quite well, and then they took us to a post-wedding celebration where, as ever, sitting quietly in the back was never going to be an option and I was hauled up to the front to take part in some goat eating ceremony with no clue as to what was going on! Was great fun though. However, although being a foreigneer can result in some great moments like that, mostly, I'm getting really quite fed up of being unable to walk down the street followed by cires of "mzungu! mzungu" (meaning foreign white person) followed, usually, by an offer of a ride in a taxi, despite the fact that nearly all the taxi users I have seen are black, or some other unappealing deal. Apart from the many greetings, my Swahili vocabularly mostly consists of phrases like "I don't like it", "I don't want it", "I'm in a hurry", "go away" and other such friendly epithets.

Nevertheless, everyone I've got to know quite well here is lovely, the food is fantastic, the work is interesting and I'm ridiculously excited about seeing those members of my family who are coming out in a week (!!) so everthing is pretty good here. Still looking forward to coming home though!

Lots of love xxx