April 17th, 2018 by jamiefelzer

I’ve gotten lots of questions about what life is truly like in Macha, so I figured I could dedicate a blog post to them…

The MRT hostel

My living quarters are part of a nicely constructed brick hostel that can house up to 36 people. There are two wings, men’s and women’s and within each wing there are shared rooms and individual rooms. I am in a shared room with 2 bunk beds, although luckily, I do not have to share. Each bed comes with a mosquito net, and being the OCD person I am, I patched up a few tiny holes on mine. They provide us with sheets and a towel. Each room has a sink, light and fan. Our power works at all times of the day and we’ve only had one very brief power outage because there is a generator. Down the hall in each wing is a bathroom with multiple toilet rooms and showers (there is even a handicap accessible toilet). We are the lucky few that have running water and overhead showers at all hours of the day. Most people take bucket showers and don’t have running water except for 4 hours a day. The water isn’t always warm, but it isn’t frigid either generally. The complex I am staying in is part of the Macha Research Trust, which has gates on all sides and is locked from 2200-0600 every night. From what I understand, we are the only ones that have running water at all hours of the day, and our water is safe to drink since it is from a deep well, not the local borehole that most people’s water is fed in from.

Ester in her amazing garden

We have a kitchen in the hostel complete with microwave, toaster oven/stovetop, fridge/freezer, water boiler. We have been cooking most of our meals with our very limited non-perishables because there is not a real store for over an hour away on a very bumpy road. There is a small market behind the hospital where we can get rice, beans, some tomatoes and there are a few little general stores with peanut butter, soap and an assortment of other items.  We had thought that we would be able to get cooked meals here, but that hasn’t really come to fruition. Instead, we’ve been going to the hospital guest house which is run by the wonderful Ester. She is a fabulous cook and we’ve been enjoying getting lunch from her. This is now her third guest house she has run, and the first that she has started from scratch. Prior to starting this, she was actually working at New Day Orphanage, where I was last week. However, she is from Macha and her mother is elderly so she wanted to be here to take care of her. Outside of the hospital guest house, she has a very impressive garden which we were fortunate to walk through the other day. There were all sorts of vegetables, herbs that she uses to make her sauces from scratch, and there was even a natural squash luffa that she gave to us! Meals will generally consist of a protein, rice or nshima (the local dish that people generally eat for 2-3 meals a day, made of corn into fluffy cake) or pasta and a veggie. At home for dinner, I make an odd conglomeration of canned veggies, rice/quinoa and canned chicken if I treat myself. Peanut butter was definitely the smartest thing for my to bring as it goes well with any meal, dessert or snack! In the mornings I have some instant coffee and either some instant oatmeal I brought (but am now finished with sadly) or some granola (without any milk or yogurt) so I just have crunchy granola. We did find some eggs at the market the other day, so were able to treat ourselves to an egg scramble which was lovely!

entrance to the hospital

The walk to the hospital from MRT is about 7 minutes and is over a dirt road that for part of the way is lined with gorgeous yellow-flowering trees that always make me smile. I’ve already spoken about the set-up of the hospital in my initial post so I won’t bore you with that again. Typically, the doctors round on each ward 3 times a week, so what I’ve started doing with the medical students is rounding on any sick patients or those with new labs every day and we will make any changes if necessary. For anything major of course, we run it by the local docs. During rounds I’ve been typically splitting up seeing patients with the attending when it’s busy, as it has been, so rounding doesn’t take 3 hours in one ward. I’ll briefly run the plan by him after I’ve seen my half of the patients and then take care of the rest, as long as I have a translator (which is often the limiting step)! The outpatient department is a first come, first serve set-up and people may come from all over. Sometimes people are referred there from another clinic, sometimes they come in unconscious, or with products of an abortion, or ready to deliver, or with terrible non-healing wounds, or fractures that they’ve been walking on. We literally never know what will amble through the door when we sit down!

My favorite part of the walk

In the evenings, we’ve been doing a lot of reading on topics of diseases we don’t typically encounter, or new iterations of diseases we’ve seen, or trying to find out if there is any literature to support certain practices that are performed here. Between that, blogs, and doing my various research projects that keeps our nights busy. We only purchased 25 GB of data for 2 of us to use for the entire month, so have to be careful on how much we use. We were so very lucky that somebody had an extra router and sim card for which we could just purchase time, otherwise we’d totally be without connection to the world! There is really nothing much to do here after dark, and I don’t like to be out after true dark as there are no lights outside our complex, which does have street lights. We have gone to a game night and a movie night which were both wonderful, but the walk back seemed so long despite bright lights we carried!