Out in the school

Jun.14

Another interesting day today. I was in the “male ward” following round this morning. They call it male ward for men age 5 and up, so you would see 7, 8 yr olds sitting on the beds playing with their crutches. The ward is divided into surgical and medical sides. On the surgical side, there were many trauma, broken bone, and fracture cases. Many of them were from ox cart accidents. Ox cart is the major form of transportation around the area. On the medical side, there were astonishing amount of HIV/TB infection, almost every other beds was such a case with all sorts of complications. I saw a patient with Steven-Johnson’s syndrome and another with Kaposi’ sarcoma.

In the afternoon, I went with two Zambian research team members to a local school for the parent meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to explain to them the project and ask them to sign the consent form. The parents were very enthusiastic and asked tons of questions. Their biggest concern was collecting saliva sample. They believed that there was something suspicious about taking saliva. Eventually we were able to explain to them. Some of them could not write, so they used ink fingerprint as a signature. The school we went was a basic school, which include grade 1 to grade 9. The kids were really curious when they saw us. Many of them came up and stared at me, LOL I guess they have never seen an Asian face before.


Oh and a really funny story today. I am usually a bit apprehensive about taking adult pictures because I am sure if they liked to be photoed. But today at the market when I was taking surrounding pictures,a woman came up to me and said “can you copy me”? So I “copied” her on the camera and she was very happy to see herself in the camera.