week #1

o kae? that literally means "are you here" to which you respond "ke teng," meaning "i'm here..." similar to "how are you...i'm fine." setswana phrases number 2 and 3, watch out!
these are some pictures of the clinic where i will spend a lot of my time. it's a beautiful facility with kind and helpful staff...so far i've only met 2 whose names i can pronounce, but we're taking setswana lessons so maybe in a year i'll have 3 names down :).

so the past week....after all my angsting about starting work, we were actually in orientation all week learning....and after week #3 of lecture i've decided i have the attention span of a 2yr old! we spent a lot of time being trained in the pediatric HIV curriculum that we will be teaching to rural botswana health care professionals during week long courses called "kitso" (setswana for "knowledge"). apparently the minute we stepped off the plane we became "specialists," which is code for "expert" in everything pediatric...kinda scary since i'm pretty sure nothing miraculous happened to me on the plane ride over! regardless, "specialists" we are, and as such are responsible for a lot more than i realized: clinic, hospital, occasional NICU (neonatal intensive care unit), codes, and every subspecialty under the sun! we also spend around 25% of our time traveling to more rural areas for education and help with difficult patients. there are also about a billion projects to get involved in...so far i'm signed up to help with general pediatric eduction (designing the core curriculum for the new med school/peds residency as well as lectures for medical officers), advanced pediatric CPR training for the staff, and teen club/adolescent services.

i start this week on wards (the inpatient hospital service) and am more than a little scared...the hospital is called princess marina hospital and it is the national referral center for botswana. there is a pediatric ward partitioned into 4 pods that hold anywhere from 20-60 beds (in the busy season they cram matresses together), and a 60 bed NICU with 6-8 ventilators. these are covered by 3 ward teams and one NICU team. there is 1 pediatric surgeon and one of our docs who is a pediatric oncologist (both the only ones of their kind in the country), and for anything else we are the specialists. all in all botswana has a much better health care system than other african countries, but it is still very different and resource limited. despite that they're doing a wonderful job with what they have and i'm excited to learn from the people here.

so i'm off to another week...and while at the moment i feel inadequate and nervous about my scope of "expertise," i know that the variety will be both challenging and stimulating, and in the end will grow me as a person as well as a physician...i'll let you know how it goes :).