Dinner at the Convent - March 6th

March 6^th

I finished updating the excel file of patients with HIV including all of the RIP and transfers that had been written all over the printed out old document. That took until about 10:30 am. I couldn’t find MacDonald to figure out what else he would like me to do so I helped Lillian and Quinta with finding the patients files on the shelves labeled by year. Inside the patients little booklet of medical history is their patient number written down.. NCH – 156 – 07 would mean I look under the year 2007 on the shelf then look for number 156. And that’s where the HIV medical history and prescription information is kept.

Nothing is private here, from bathing to men urinating on the side of the road to medical information and treatment. Anyone can be in the room and it’s not confidential at all. The HIV patients receive their prescriptions in the same little room (the size of like a Moses Lake Clinic exam room) and the door is open.  Lillian, Ajam and Quinta are all talking with patients at the same time in there, and Lillian is counting and cutting pills in half right there on the same table.

In the hospital there are posters for washing hands that read:

“Wash your hands before eating and after shitting.”

That’s just how it’s said here. Shitting.

Yesterday after I couldn’t find Mac I ate lunch with Terry, Jim and my dad (left over soup basically, chicken broth left over spaghetti noodles and vegetables from the two meals before).  Then I still couldn’t find Mac so I went walking with my camera, “strolling” as they call it here. One lady called up from the cook house below the walk way and said hello and asked how I was. I started walking down a little path towards the area and she called me down to see her. I took her picture, (I’ll try to post when I have internet that is good enough) and she told me she had just had twins and was staying in the cookhouse until she could pay the medical bill to leave. She took me over to see her babies so I took a picture of her babies with her mother, as well as another woman with her baby. There were so many people down there and they all wanted to see the photos after I took them. They really like to have their pictures taken! Especially the kids.  The woman who brought me down to the cook house was talking to me and reached up to get hair out of my face.

It’s such a different world. 

The afternoon was just kind of lazy, no internet either so we kind of just hung out. Terry plays a lot of spider solitaire on her computer.

We also went to the sisters for dinner, over at the convent. We walked in and greeted many of them and then they sang “Welcome To You” together and clapped. It was very cute. They fed us salad made of lettuce, carrots sliced onion and tomatoes; I stuck with the lettuce and carrots (which doesn’t follow the rules, “peel it, boil it…”). Well first Sister Relindus (from Austria but has been here since 1963) served us each some sort of vegetable like soup and then the salad and then there was chicken (on the bone but I ate it), potatoes (which were basically fries not fried up as much),  and some steamed and oiled vegetables (carrots green beens potatoes… basically what everything is). They also served us a roll cake thing at the end. And of course only the 4 of us, Sister Xaveria, and Relindus ate it, the rest ate other food.

Came back and went to bed.