It's been ten days since I left home and I am happy to report that I am alive and well. Things have actually been going really well (evidenced by the lack of crying and/or cursing our decision to pack up our lives and moving to a new continent) and I think we will be really happy here. Ill give you a quick summary for what we are doing here. Daniel and I are volunteering at The Chiri Health Center through the non-profit Lalmba (http://www.lalmba.org/) as the Medical Director and the Public Health Director. Daniel will be in charge of both seeing patients and supervising/teaching the nurses while I will be in charge of making sure the various public health (PH) programs run smoothly.
What are those programs you ask?? Good question! We work both in the clinic and in eight or so outside communities that are anywhere from a 30 minute walk to a 45 minute + 2 hour walk. In the clinic the PH department does TB and malnutrition counseling with patients, cooking classes, HEW (Health Extension Worker) trainings and has a demonstration garden. In the communities, they call it "Outreach," we do vaccinations, demonstration gardens, malnutrition and TB screenings, mens/womens groups, and this year will begin working on starting safe water systems (its a WHO program). Erin, my predecessor, has done an amazing job streamlining the program and really help focusing our efforts to be most effective. She has done an excellent job at training me to take over and I hope that I can keep up all the good work she has done.
I miss home but having some of the luxuries we are used to in the US makes life pretty easy....hot water, my own toilet, Internet (though its pretty unreliable) and computers to watch dvds (thank you sooo much to those of you that gave me some!). Its also unbelievably beautiful here...very mountainous, green and lush. Outside my door there are monkeys, birds, great insect noises-- all of which making reading on the porch and falling asleep just delightful. People have been super nice and welcoming, and just being a farange eing (foreigner) makes you an instant celebrity. And by celebrity, I mean its like being someone who has five heads, twelve arms and a body made of jello. I'm not sure what people think of me or the other ex-pats but we definitly get a lot of attention. On every run I've taken people call out hello, run out of their homes to say hi and shake your hand, and kids often join in to run with us for a while. I'm sure this will get old soon, but so far I love getting to run up and give random kids high fives and yell out "hello" in response.
I need to get moving, but I will try and write again soon...there is so much to tell and share about this place.
If you have read this the whole way you are pretty dedicated and most likely I miss the heck out of you!!!
