After an intensive week of training our new
nurses, the new sparkly Kitovu Hospital
Baby Unit has finally opened. And
the word seems to have spread amongst the baby community, as they keep
coming!
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| Open at Last!!! |
One of our sweet premature babies decided
to contribute to the “real-life” feel of our training, which we felt was very
considerate. On the Thursday afternoon,
a student nurse timidly came into the Baby Unit room, apologised for the
interruption, and proceeded to greet individually everyone there with a
charming “good afternoon”.... before mentioning that there was a baby needing
resuscitation. We rushed through to the
labour suite where the baby was, and found her not breathing, grey in colour,
and with her hysterical mother by her side.
Luckily, we were very much in “resuscitation mode”, having been training
all week, so immediately went through the motions of coordinated breaths and
compressions.
Honestly, we felt like it was getting
futile, but with all our new nurses observing, it seemed a good thing to
continue until we had emphasised all the important parts of baby
resuscitation. However, Praise God
(x100), after removing all the milk from the baby’s stomach, she suddenly
decided to start breathing again! Not
only that, but she is alive, squirmy, perky, feeding, growing and a real
delight, two whole weeks later, all at the weight of just 1.14kg. What a blessing that we had all been there
training! A serious case of God’s good
timing! And the really wonderful thing
is how dedicated her mum is to her (something we have found quite unusual in
our premature babies, as often the mothers are just plain scared of them, and
find it difficult to bond with them). Do
keep them in your prayers, though, as all these little ones can have a rocky
road ahead of them.
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| The Little Fighter! |
The only challenge now is getting the
nurses to stop trying to save
a baby who is clearly very very dead – and that is a challenge I never dreamed
we would have. We are really delighted
with our new staff!
It’s a sad and unusual week, because we
have no new news on our chickens, other than the standard Jaffie-related daily
maulings. However, that doesn’t mean
that Jaffie has not been getting into trouble in other new ways, purely to entertain
us. Last week, Sarah was very amused
when an indignant and pained-looking Tim came into the house. It seems that he had been playing with
Jaffie, who had got over-excited and leapt up to bite the nearest hanging object
she could find. Thankfully he was
wearing a fairly baggy pair of shorts, which went some way to “softening the
bite”. Fortunately for you, we have no
photo of that, but we do have a photo of the kitchen after Jaffie was left in
charge of it for the day!
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| What a house-proud pup! |
Finally, we have a new regular section of
our blog for you which we have entitled:
“You
know you’re in Uganda when....”
1.
You see something you like in
the shop and feel the immediate urge to buy 10, as next week, no doubt, it will
be out of stock
2.
You open a jar of “blueberry
jam” (an exciting Christmas gift that Tim had been overjoyed to spot) to be
greeted by something resembling Fungus the Bogeyman’s snot!
3.
You pre-order, and pre-pay for,
breakfast (in order to ensure all items on the menu will be there), and then
arrive the next day to find that “we don’t have the breakfast today”
4.
Your football tournament is
stopped for 10 minutes in order to disentangle a large horned cow from the goal
net
