down in the booneys

One of the coolest things that we were able to do was go to the villages for organized health outreaches. We were lucky enough to go on three of these excursions.

We drove in the morning for about thirty minutes to get to the village. When we got there, everything was already set up, and people were already seeing patients. There was a dental side, a general side, a maternal side, a lab side, a pharmacy side, and an ultrasound side.

At the dental side, Frank (the dentist) was usually numbing people and then removing their teeth. There were so many people to see him! I feel bad because so many of those people probably didn't need to get teeth removed, but removing teeth was really the only feasible option, all factors considered.

At the maternal side, the midwives would give antenatal care to the expecting women who were present. They would palpate for the baby, check how many weeks she was, and see if they could hear a heartbeat. Sometimes, Juliet, the ultrasound tech, would do an ultrasound on them to get a more precise estimated date of delivery and check for the proper presentation of the baby.

At the general side, there were two or three PAs/Clinical Officers meeting patients. The people suffered from all sorts of ailments- from dizziness to stomach pain to fungal infections to hypertension to malaria. The PAs would take a quick patient history and then offer their best diagnosis and send the patient to the lab to get tested or to the pharmacy to get medications.

At the lab side, Simon was running the show. At the lab, people would get tested for HIV, malaria, other tropical diseases, and UTIs. I got to help with the record keeping, and it was amazing how many people they saw in a day. So many people were tested for HIV, but there were not many positive results. Simon says that's due to the fact that people who are actually HIV-positive never come to these things. Targeted HIV testing needs to become more prevalent in order to really help those that need to be helped.

At the pharmacy side, they basically just handed out the medications that were prescribed to them.

At the ultrasound side, Juliet was doing ultrasounds on children to see if they had pneumonia. She had an app and an ultrasound that plugged into an iPhone, so that was very neat to see her use that. She took ultrasounds of several different views of the lungs to really see if they had pneumonia.

The coolest part of all of this was just standing there for a moment and watching it all unfold. We were in a church, and there were a few hundred people, just waiting or being treated. It was so simply designed, but it was so well organized. KIHEFO offered the best care that they could, and they offered it free of charge. The pastor was so grateful for us at the end of the outreach. He shook each of our hands personally and thanked us.

Here are some pictures from the outreach!