Life in Chiure

Now that I have been at site for a little over a month, I am finally getting to know the ins and outs of daily living in Chiure. My day starts out at around 5:30 every morning, which sounds super early in American terms but here I am one of the last ones in my neighborhood out of bed. I always start to hear the world waking up outside my window around 4am. So I wake up, do my workout routine, take my bath, enjoy a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee (which I have finally perfected just when it is getting too hot out to really enjoy), apply my daily layer of sun screen, and then head to the office.

Moving in to my house!

My first week at site I was following my counterpart around the hospital and learning how things run there. I spent a good part of the week in the maternity wing, observing consultations and looking through record books to search for women who have not been coming back for their HIV treatment for the duration of their pregnancy. The transmission of HIV from mother to child is very preventable as long as the women follow medical advice and consistently follow treatment. The problem comes with the difficulties a lot of the women face in getting to the hospital to pick up their medications. They are only allowed to receive a one month supply at a time, making it so they must return to the hospital rather frequently. This seems like a small price to pay to avoid infecting your unborn child, but the tasks of daily living and the fact that many women must travel more than 50K on foot to their nearest health center makes it a daunting task for many.

The mother also must remain on treatment during the time she is breastfeeding the child as breast mild is another form of transmission. Once the child eats normal food for the first time, it is crucial that the mother not go back to breast feeding the child because small cuts can form in the child's throat which the milk can then enter. This also seems very uncomplicated on the surface, but what happens when the mother switches the child to normal food and then a few weeks later no longer has resources to feed her child. Her only option to get her child the nutrition he/she needs is to go back to breast feeding the child. And this just barely touches the surface of the complications many people face with HIV treatment. Things always seem simple on the surface until the true reality of the situation becomes exposed.

One day I was in the hospital I spent in the lab. This was one of my favorite days I must say. I learned all about malaria tests, the different types of malaria, and HIV testing. I even did a handful of HIV tests myself. Out of the 5 tests I did, 2 of them were positive. This is when it hit me how much of a prevalence the virus really has here. It is one thing to hear all about it in an information session, but it is a completely different feeling to be sitting right there, with the patients waiting outside the door as you run the test that could impact the rest of their life.



Wiwanana Office

So after my time in the hospital, I began working with my other organization Wiwanana. So far, here I have spent most of my time in the office. I have been trying to learn as much about the organization as possible. Their goal is to serve the really rural, remote areas in the district. They go house to house and evaluate living conditions, mainly concerned with water treatment, latrines, hygiene, mosquito nets, really anything involved in healthy every day living. I have not had a chance yet to do any hands on activities with this organization yet, but hopefully I can dive in sometime in the near future.



After work I stop by the market on my walk home and buy things for dinner. When I get home, my neighborhood kids are always waiting for me on my porch. I usually spend an hour or two hanging out with them, talking, laughing, enjoying each others company. This is probably my favorite part of
the entire day :)

Then I send them all home and start making dinner. The process of cooking here has been an interesting thing to try to figure out and is defiantly something I am still working on. I have an electric stove but every time I use my pan that doesn't have a rubber handle, the pan shocks me! I have to put the pan on the stove, get it all set to go, then plug the stove in, let everything cook, then unplug the stove before I touch the pan again to take it off. Since cooking is something I never did much of before I came, and ingredients here are also different than at home, every night of cooking seems like an experiment. The main things I cook tend to be pasta with tomato sauce (the one thing I seem to have mastered the best!), some mixture of veggies cooked and put over rice, or the stand by peanut butter sandwich. I have also started to throw tuna in with my pasta or veggies for a little protein. I never liked tuna back home, but it is growing on me now! Rice and beans were my favorite meal by the end of training, but I haven't quite mastered how to make those successfully yet. I know, it seems like it should be really simple, but it just never turns out as good as my host moms did! I never realized how much I would miss her cooking.

So after dinner, I clean up and then usually just go to bed. Days start early and end early here. The sun starts to rise probably around 4am, then is already starting to go down on my walk home from work around 4:30 and it is dark by about 6 or 6:30. I don't like leaving my house after dark, and the doors usually get locked up right after dinner. This is the first time in a long time I am able to sleep a good 10 hours every night without feeling guilty like there is something else I need to be getting done. I am defiantly enjoying that part of Mozambique :)