Humbled

There's a pervasive idea that we should give/help only when we have more than we need/want. When we have an excess, sure, we can give to others. 

Here at the camp I see how wrong that idea is. All you need is a generous heart. The people I am meeting here are teaching me so much, I'm starting to doubt that I came here to help them. They are the ones helping me! 

I started a project to screen all the residents >40 and the pregnant ladies for diabetes and high blood pressure. That means I have been walking around the camp visiting the rooms and talking to them (through a translator) to ask them to fast for 12hrs and come see me in the morning. And they smile at me, invite me for dinner, for a cup of tea, the kids jump in my arms, or follow me around everywhere. They left everything behind, fleeing for their lives. They have nothing, but what little they have, they're willing to share. 

I'm humbled by their generosity, and I only hope I can learn from them. 

A few general pictures of the camp to give you all an idea of how things are:

Entrance to the abandoned factory converted into living quarters

Corridors

Corridors

Some families closed up little corridors and use adjacent rooms as rooms in a house

Cooking facilities 

The delicious food provided by us by some of the refugees, who insisted we all come to dinner, then actually came back to the clinic the next day and brought us another plateful! 

Here they are! I asked them to teach me how to make it. Hopefully that will work!! 

The tents outside -- it's too cold now, so they're being moved in, but some don't want to, because the rooms are all close together. In the tents they have more privacy

The UNHCR is responsible for registering them and also provide the tents, blankets and other necessities

There's even a little library!! 

Oinofyta Refugee Camp - Greece

First Impressions: I arrived late last night, and was taken directly to the volunteer house. It's a normal house down in the village, with all the amenities you'd expect. Today, after breakfast, we went to the camp. I was given two jobs: go through the census and make a list of all the residents above 40 years old, to do a screening for diabetes. Then a second job was added, to make a list of the pregnant women, also to screen for gestational diabetes, blood pressure and proteinuria, to screen for preeclampsia. There are about 650 residents in the camp, and about 65 people in total, combining both lists. Now I have to find them all, and somehow communicate to them that they have to fast for 12hrs and come the next morning so I can measure their glucose levels + blood pressure, etc. Communication will be the fun part, but I've already met some kids who speak English, so I think I'll just enlist their help as translators, at least until I learn enough to pronouce things right. 

Now it's friday evening, rainy, cold. Most people have been moved into an adjacent empty factory for the winter, but some are still out in tents. Even in the factory, it's pretty cold (no heating). I had my big jacket on most of the time (except in the clinic, there's heating in there!!), but saw kids walking around with flip-flops. I don't know if they didn't have shoes, or just didn't put them on. There's a warehouse full of donated clothes, but maybe not the right sizes, I don't know. 

All in all, it's a bit overwhelming. They were smiling, the kids were playing, I got some hugs and kisses even, but I can't imagine living in such close quarters with hundreds of people. I can't imagine having to leave your home and flee to find safety so far away from everything that was ever dear to you. Nobody would choose to risk their lives on the way and come here, if they had any other option. They don't. So all I can hope to do, is make it a little bit easier on them. A little bit safer. To smile, to play, to talk. To do any little thing I can to make it better. It'll never be normal. It'll never be good. 

Good would be to wake up tomorrow in their own home, in their own city, in their own country, and realize the war was all just a nightmare--not reality. 

And the Countdown begins!

Hi friends!

I've been enjoying a few days of a well deserved vacation. The weather is beautiful (it's summer here!) and Watson (the kitty) and I have been lounging around, reading books for fun, taking care of the garden I created on my balcony and hanging out with friends. Today I got to eat the first 2 homegrown strawberries!!

However, this is all about to change very soon. In 6 days I will be on a plane, flying over the Atlantic and heading first to Paris. I have to stop there in order to request my visa for Chad, as there is no embassy here. I also get to see my friend Nadya for a couple of days, and that's a nice bonus.

Then I fly to Athens, and take a train to Oinofyta, a sea-side town in Greece, where I will be volunteering for 2 weeks at a Refugee Camp. This is with an organization called Adventist Help, and I have a few friends who have volunteered with them in the past and told me some incredible stories. Since the beginning of the refugee crisis, I wanted to do something to help, and when I heard their stories and the opportunity to help, I had to do it. I can't think of a better way to spend Christmas then helping people who really need it.

After Greece I fly to Chad. I can't wait to get there!! I have just now finished my 2nd year of medical school, so besides our rural family med clinic (where I started going once a week last year and continued this year), I don't get much patient contact. I definitely don't get any OR time, and I desperately miss the OR!! So it'll be a nice change, to be in the OR all day, every day again. :)

Stay tuned and check the blog periodically (or subscribe!) so you can keep up-to-date with my latest adventures. Also, if you're the praying kind, please pray for my trip, and for every patient I will come in contact with.

Thanks for your support! 

Dreams

                   

It seems impossible. I can barely believe it, and I'm the one living it! I'm 10 days away from finishing my 2nd year of medical school. 

It seems like it was only yesterday, that I was living in Berlin, having a crisis about my future and talking with a good friend about the fact that the only thing I had really ever wanted to do was medicine, but the chance had passed me by. I was too old. I couldn't drop everything now and start over. 

Or could I? 

The phrase on the picture above is so obvious, but so hard to see sometimes. Medicine is a long term goal. It takes a lot of time and effort. You might have to give up other things, and you'll definitely have to make sacrifices in order to achieve it. But if it's what you really want, you owe it to yourself to go for it. Because if you don't, the time will pass anyway, and you might look back and realize that if you had started then, you'd have accomplished it now. 

So do it. Whatever your dream is, run to it. Be brave. The first step, the decision, is the hardest. After that, nothing can stop you. Nothing should stop you. 

Life in Chad

I was talking to a friend this week and realized it's hard for people to imagine what day to day life in Chad is actually like. So I went through my pictures and did a little research to get some data to share with you guys.

First off, some numbers about the healthcare situation in Chad, taken from the Human Development Index compiled by the UN (click to see better):

I put together the top 10 countries and the bottom 10 countries. For easier comparison, I highlighted the United States and Chad. (All info can be found at http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi ) 

Some other interesting information gathered from the same index: 

Percentage of the population with some high school: 95% in the US  -- 5,5% in Chad

Percentage of the population with access to electricity: 100 % in the US -- 6,4% in Chad

Chad hasn't moved forward in time, and people still live as they did 2000 years ago. No, that's not a typo, I mean 2 thousand years ago. The men work the fields, the women gather wood to cook, fetch water from a well/river, take care of the children, cook, sell vegetables in the market. The meager 6,4% who have electricity, have their own gas fueled generator (like the hospital). There's absolutely no sanitation or waste disposal systems. What little trash they produce which is not biodegradable, they burn. 

Mode of transport of the RICH -- most people just walk

What the villages look like

A little closer

The houses are single rooms build from mud bricks and straw. The "kitchen" is in the center of the yard, where they build the fire to cook over. You might remember the story of Adamah (beware of the photos!) who had extensive 3rd degree burns over large portions of her body. This happens very frequently and I know of 4 people (2 adults, 2 children) who died due to burns from cooking fires. 

Carrying a ridiculous amount of wood on their heads

Cooking on burning wood

The school

If they want flour, they have to make it themselves, plant and reap the grains, let them dry, and then pound the heck out of them until it becomes flour. (The women do this, the man in the video was just showing off *because I was filming.*

The market in town

The pharmacy (yes, meds straight out in the sun with temperatures of up to 35-40 Celsius)

With the exception of the main highway which connects N'Djamena (the capital) with Moundou (the second largest city) there are no paved roads, and even the conditions of that highway would make you cry if you saw it. 

And lastly, a little view of the hospital where I worked the previous two times: 

The men's ward (there's an equivalent female ward)

The central yard where family and patients hang out

The OR

And below is the hospital I will be working at this time, which is different from the previous 2 times. It's a much bigger hospital with a little bit better infrastructure, even though it is *really* in the boonies instead of the city and it takes 7hrs on a bus plus 1hr in a moto-taxi through dirt roads to get there from the capital.

Chad - Round 3

The last time I went to Chad, in January this year (not even a year ago!) I thought it would be my last time. The day I left, I remember watching the city of Moundou going by the window of the bus, and feeling sad that I would probably never see it again. It was weird, because part of me felt like Chad was home. It had won a little piece of my heart.

Well, it turns out that *I am* going back!! Dr. Scott is no longer there, he moved to a different hospital in Sierra Leone. But the Bere Hospital has some great doctors, whom I met for a weekend, and they were happy to have me come and volunteer with them. So I bought tickets!

This is a bigger hospital at a very rural area. Some people travel for days to get there and receive medical care. The work they're doing there, against all odds and against all reason, is incredible. I can't wait to become a part of the team, to help anyway I can, and to learn as much as possible.

To make my trip possible, I have started a crowdfunding page. For those of you who want to and are able to help financially, every dollar counts and it will be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, every prayer,word of encouragement and positive thought is also very valued and much needed!

Watch the blog for more stories from med school and from the upcoming trip. Oh, yeah! And here's the link for my page, feel free to share it and help spread the word!!

https://www.gofundme.com/medical-volunteer-trip-to-africa-2v983vnw

That time when... med school kicked my butt

Second year of med school has been a blur so far. I arrived back from my trip to Africa on the day my classes started, literally dropped my bags at home and went straight to class. I do not advise doing that and will not be doing it again.

My brain was not ready to jump from Chad straight to classes. So while I tried to adapt to being back, I started running behind class materials and felt like I was playing catch up. The entire semester. My stress levels went to record highs, and I even had insomnia, something that, with rare exceptions, I had never had. I passed all of my classes, but my class ranking suffered a bit and I'll have to work extra hard to recover.

The result is that I finished the semester utterly exhausted. But since I'm an overachiever at heart, instead of taking advantage of winter break to recuperate before second semester, I went ahead and signed up for an elective. Because I'm insane. I did escape for a week to go to the beach, because I felt that I could simply not start 2nd semester without recharging my batteries at least a little bit. I'll talk about that on the next blog post, suffice to say, it worked! A week in paradise was just what the doctor ordered. :)

However, I realized that I need to cut myself some slack, and not be so hard on myself. This semester was pretty tough, but I passed. Beating myself up because of class rank is stupid, and I know I can do better next semester, when I won't start out stressed and already playing catch up. Plus, we start out with Neuro and I love neuro!! So it should be fun.

So the two lessons to take home are: 1- don't come back from a stressful trip to Africa (or elsewhere) the same day your classes start. Give yourself some time to arrive and adapt before classes start. 2- do your best and don't beat yourself up if the results are not exactly what you expected. After all, it was just 1 semester and I passed!!