Pamoja Women's Clinic

We’d offered to help anyway we could and Dr. Mino offered to give us a tour so we got up and walked down the dusty road to through the slums to the clinic about 8-9 blocks from here.  We arrived at this nice white house, and were ushered into the clinic as honoured guests.  It hasn’t opened again yet (this week sometime)  so we got to crawl around a bit.  Looks like it will be a step up from what we saw in Costa Rica.

Jen and Rachel spent the morning putting together kits for expectant mothers and inventorying what we’ll buy tomorrow to leave them in good shape.  Apparently mothers have to buy their own suture kits and surgical gloves.  These kits will have knit hats for the babies, some jumpers, maxi pads for the mothers, a few diapers and some post natal vitamins.  The plan it to give these out in exchange for a prenatal visit that will check for the presence of HIV so they can get the mothers on the right drugs prior to the baby’s birth.  

It’s a worthy cause so we’ve offered to pick up a bunch of the supplies to create a bunch of these kits.

They then also spent the better part of the afternoon acting as computer printers.  Nobody has printers or photocopiers here so they created 162 inventory sheets for the various drugs and supplies they need.  Shawn and I played at being Pharmacists and dispensed hundreds of small bags of medications as the local staff is useless at counting out pills so they wanted prepackaged amounts of highly used drugs they could just hand out.  We got to learn about all kinds of drugs.  We had a lunch at a local canteen (Dr. Mino and the 4 of us).  With tip, it came to less than $4 for all of us.  Finally a place that exceeds our budget requirements!!!  The food was quite good to boot.

Then back to the guest house for some schooling for the kids and time for me to sort out the internet issue and get caught up on the blog.  We have been having some fun with the internet here and our access to our bank has been shut off due to repeated attempts at access (not by us).  We will get it sorted out but the 8 hour time difference is playing havoc.  Jen is also looking forward into Europe and Asia to figure out our next stops.  Phew…  10 days in one.  That is where we are now… safe and sound back in Moshi, trying to do some volunteering and figuring out our next steps.  Love to all!