Saturday Health Screening and Visit to a Hospice

Saturday, July 2

Today started off a little later than scheduled but no big deal! We woke up, ate breakfast as usual and headed to Garden Compound for some pre-scheduled health screenings. Dick’s friend, Paul Hart, an optometrist, donated lots of reading and easily adjustable prescription glasses. We had about 100 kids show up, and ended up giving out about 30 pairs of glasses to kids who had some vision impairments.

In addition to the glasses, we had nurses and Clinical Officers (like a physician's assistant) from N’Gombe Compound doing a more in-depth health screenings. 

After kids got their screenings done, a bunch of us played with them until we left. We didn’t bring anything to play with so we had them teach us some of their songs. One in particular was sung over and over again by a girl named Susan. She’d swing her hips with her fingers pointed in the air and sing a-tooty-ta.

The kids also had their own games.

Joe made a sweet friend who ended up falling asleep in his arms during the screenings. She was asleep for so long that by the time we needed to leave we had to wake her up!

We wrapped up at Garden a little later than expected. We wanted to make sure we saw all the kids who came. After the screenings we came back to the guesthouse for a quick lunch.

After lunch we piled back into the van and went to visit a hospice about 20 minutes from the guesthouse. I'd attach pictures but they didn't want us taking photos (for obvious reasons). During our tour we learned that Zambia’s hospices differ from the hospices we think of in the US. In Zambia hospice is for patients who are either dying or have chronic illnesses, whereas in the US, hospice is only for patients who are nearing the end of life. Only a few patients were at the hospice when we visited, but our guide, Marilyn said it’s usually quite full but it was a weekend day. Marilyn is the nurse that tends to most of the patients there. She was very sweet and interested in all of the work CWB does in Zambia.  She introduced us to two or three patients; one in particular that stood out was a young girl with a tube in her nose. Marilyn said she suffered from a brain tumor that couldn’t be removed due to the placement of it. In a smaller group, once the tour concluded we talked a little bit about how hard it is to see people in those conditions and why it was so important to visit these places anyways. As fun and exciting as the trip can be, there are also parts of this trip that are very emotional and force everyone to step outside of their comfort zones and really look and some of the inequalities that are so apparent in our world. As hard and as painful as that is, it’s somewhat necessary in order for change to occur.