Fellows Blog: Day 30
Today’s big event was doing our OB curriculum (Amber’s other baby….. shhhh don’t tell Cornelius Giovanni Harrison)! We knew she had obstetrics on the brain when she got her daily Co-star notification (her daily horoscope) and read it as “your contractions make you interesting.” (It actually said “your contradictions make your interesting”… but anyways, we digress). We began the day reviewing the slides and how we planned to present it while eating microwave Mac and cheese. Sad news though: we now have to ration our Mac and cheese because we’re running low. We (meaning Haleigh) also finished the protein bites today.
Today, we actually started somewhat on time! The training went relatively smoothly- Amber successfully fielded a couple ~interesting~ questions, but for the most part, everyone was professional and respectful. We taught everyone about the stages of pregnancy, some reproductive anatomy, how to deliver a baby, and how to approach pregnancy and delivery complications, such as ectopic pregnancy and placenta previa. The birthing model with the cervical collar was a big hit! We had practical stations, where people practiced delivering the baby and clamping and cutting the umbilical cord, reviewed the contents of the maama kit, and were quizzed on the steps of delivery. We also showed everyone the contents of the maama kit, which include plastic sheets, gloves, ties for clamps, a surgical blade, a roll of cotton and documentation papers for the baby’s first year of life.
See here for a video of our daily walk from the training venue to the restaurant, featuring lots of street vendors and boda bodas. After the restaurant, we headed to Mukono Resort for dinner. It’s been a while since we’ve had chicken and some form potatoes, so we were actually quite excited for the meal. One thing we’ve noticed is that whenever we order donuts and African tea, we always get it before the chicken. It almost feels like we’re eating dinner in reverse, like dessert as an appetizer!
In other news, Haleigh and Amber are having bug spray induced urticaria and peeling skin, which is quite unfortunate because we can’t really stop using bug spray without exposing ourselves to whole host of diseases.
Tomorrow, we will be giving all our advanced trainees a practical skills assessment and interviewing them on their thoughts on the curriculum, how much they think they learned, and any advice they have for us to improve. We’re excited to get their feedback because they already had some good suggestions today, such as sharing the slides with trainees to refer back to later on and doing remediation. Some of their ideas weren’t the most practical, such as giving them time to study before the post test, but we appreciate their enthusiasm to help us out!
It seems to be a constant struggle to find someone able to drive us home- we wrote this entire blog thus far after we finished dinner while waiting for a van. Also while waiting, we were happy to learn that the budget for the closing ceremony event was reduced from $2500 USD to $250, even though we’re funding it from corporations in Uganda (like the water bottle companies!)
We ended the night by going over some logistics for tomorrow. Kyrillos took one for the team and called all of our trainees to remind them of their interview times, Amber entered everyone’s post-test data, and Haleigh finalized some materials. We have an early day tomorrow but are looking forward to meeting with everyone one on one!
The fancy certificate that Hannington designed for all our trainees!
Amber and Haleigh talking about how to deliver a placenta after successfully re-enacting Gio’s birth.
Amber explaining how she was a perfect child with an APGAR score of 10 (Kyrillos and Haleigh are only a little skeptical… Mama Batra please confirm).
Hannington practicing clamping and cutting the cord on Gio (kinda confusing cause he’s been born for a few days, but just don’t think about it too much)
Geckos exist on the ceiling everywhere apparently…
We thought this was a very cute picture featuring our tradition of African spiced tea and donuts
Some Ugandan money! There are also 50,000 and 5,000 shilling bills but we don’t have any at the moment. The coins are 500 and 100 shillings. It’s pretty convenient to have 2,000 shillings here (much more common than the $2 bill!) For reference, $1 is 3,714 shillings.