Chicken Street

Hope all is going well at home.
Today was a great day. We started out at 7 am sharp (Holly and I) at CURE hospital, where I will be for the next month. I must say that I am extremely impressed at this point with how organized everything is and how they truly are attempting to run it as a legitimate teaching facility. We went to morning report this morning, which is where an interesting case from the night before is shared. Ok, for those of you non-medical folk, you may want to tune out for the rest of this paragraph. The case presented was a patient who is 20wks pregnant and presented with shortness of breath. Long story short, she has severe mitral stenosis from rheumatic fever with severe tricuspid regurgitation and pulmonary hypertension. Her prognosis for this pregnancy is very poor, with a mortality rate of approximately 40%. So, now it becomes an ethical dilemma - they may raise money to send her to Pakistan for a balloon valvuloplasty. It was an interesting discussion.
Ok - non-medical people can tune back in now. Following morning report, we went on morning rounds with the team and then Dr. Hill, the OB/GYN who will be supervising me, gave Holly and I a tour of the hospital. It is comprehensive and I am impressed at the organization. We discussed goals for the next month and I am very excited to get started. I think that I will have some to offer, but I will definitely learn a lot. I will start there on Sunday and will be involved both in hospital work as well as clinic work. One big project will be to help develop protocols - both for prenatal visits and for inpatient.
Following this, we went back to the school and had some interesting spaghetti prepared by Peter. It was very spicy! While eating, we enjoyed several stories about his many exploits over the years. For those of you who know Peter, I'm sure you could imagine. We then went to an orphanage to take them cookies and fruit as well as gloves/scarves/hats that children from ECS had collected. This was one of the things I was looking forward to the most. It was an all-boys orphanage, and although we were told that there were 280 kids there, when we arrived, we found out there were actually 420! It was heartbreaking to think that most of them were likely there due to the years of war that this country has been through. It was not like my orphanage experiences in Romania and Myanmar - the kids kind of looked at us as though they weren't quite sure what we were there for. There was no attaching themselves to us or coming up to us. They were excited about the treats, but we were whisked out pretty quickly, so we did not get to spend much time with them at all. Hopefully we blessed them with a few moments of happiness.
Ok, now if you're wondering where the title came from (don't worry, this will be brief). After leaving the orphanage, we went to a place called Chicken Street. It is a large outdoor market. It was a little crazy and one of our drivers hit another car. We were able to find a few things and made it out unscathed. We are definitely a novelty here, though.
Ok, I'll stop rambling. I hope that my blogs haven't been too wordy. I'm really happy with how things are going and continue to be humbled by the workers who are here all the time and live in these difficult conditions.
More later!