Just a normal load

Sunday Best

Hospital securityman & daughter

Friday 30th September 2011

Just finished marking the First Aid exam - all passed, so I will survive another day!!

Start my 15hrs of lectures on the respiratory system and diseases this week. I had better warn them it is not as easy as First Aid…..

Since I was here last year, there is a new shop opened by an amazing Sudanese woman called Tabitha.
She was given permission by the payam (parish council) to build it just opposite the hospital. So she set to, and made the bricks, the Sisters helped with some metal sheeting for the roof, and she built it all by herself.

Now, for a woman to do this here is amazing, all the other women are looking up to her and feeling perhaps they can do things and are not just in this world for breeding. She employs a few other very poor women, and together they bake lovely bread, sometimes some mandazi (East African doughnut).

I think she has also started to cook beans for sale. The next thing she would like to do is put a cover out at the front, and have a few chairs and a small table so she can make it into a small restaurant. Will try and get a picture to you. A very strong woman, we need more of them here.

Update on the family attacked by the hyena.

Michael, the little boy, is doing very well - took his dressing down for the first time on Friday, still a small wound on his arm. Considering his tendon was severed and wrist almost wrenched off he is amazing, due to the skills of the surgeon of course.

He can move all his fingers and make a fist but can’t bend his hand back, and may never be able to do that. He has a small tube he squeezes to do his exercises. We are doing ten at a time & all the students are helping with the physio. Along with this, he is learning to count in English. At first he would repeat after me very quietly ‘one, two etc’, but now with a big loud voice. Great to hear and see, when I think what he was like when he came in. A frightened little rabbit.

His grandad is struggling with his traction, and I think on Saturday he will be going to theatre to have a higher amputation on his very fractured femur. He is anaemic, so trying to find a blood donor in the rest of his family is proving quite difficult, if only we had a blood bank.

Mum is doing well. The teeth marks up and down her arm have healed. Starting to walk on the heel, still a wound there but improving. Right hand almost healed, full movement. Her problem is her thumb on her left hand. This is the hand that she used to prise the jaws of the hyena’s mouth open to save her child.

There is a big chance she will have to have it amputated in the next few days. I will keep giving you updates.