Friday Sept 7th

Hello Everyone!!!

Well a bright an early morning for us as per usual and we are off to do our second clinic day =)

Our bus is full and no room to move but that just means we have tons of stuff to give out for our patients today.  We are all excited for this day again, I think we love the clinic days, even though they are long, they are so rewarding. 

We arrive and the lines are amazing, a lot longer than the first day.  Today we made sure it was known to be a mostly women's and children's clinic time.  So they lined up before we arrived with women and babies in one line and the children in another.  The are men there but not as many as the first day.

As all the other nurses start setting up the school for their assessments, Shirley and I and the guys head over to set up the tent to get ready for the classes.  Takes a bit but after a half an hour we are all set up.  We have a quick prayer and we start the day.

We hand out our bags to the ladies that we at the last class, and that set off all the women and all they wanted were the bags and not to listen to the class at all.  It was so sad and frustrating to watch.  But Hands at work wants them to know that when we come it doesn't just mean gifts it means that they will have to learn something too.  It takes about 45 mins to an hour to get them settled to even listen to the class.  So we brought all the bags back into the school and then waited for them to sit down and quiet down for the class.  After a bit they did and we had the class.  They asked very good questions, and we seemed to accomplish a lot. I was so happy =)

Well then it came time to hand out the bags, our interpreter tried to help and take names down, but that honestly took another hour to do that, and we had to pull her out of the all the ladies surrounding her.  It was awful, all the fighting, women get nothing there, they have to act like this.  So finally we decided that we got enough names and then we hid in the bus and a nurse walked them over by 2 and we handed them out that way, away from everything.  It took a long time!!!  I can't describe how this made Shirley and I feel, exhausting and overwhelmed!!! 

Finally we finished this up and it was already time for a quick lunch, we didn't even have time to help out the other girls with their assessments, cause we were off to teach the next class for the teens.  Well the same thing happened their, they all started the fighting too and didn't want to listen to the class.  So we just sat there again for an hour waiting for them to calm down and so we could finally teach the class.  After the class we gave out the bags there, and there were fighting, but we were finally down!  Man just exhausting all around.

We didn't have time at all to help in the clinic, we felt horrible!!  They were so busy that at 4 pm we finally just had to say we were done.  We told the few that we left that we were packing up because we had finished our medications and supplies for assessments.  Hard to say no more, but we had to get going.  We were all so tired and exhausted!!!  To say the least.

We headed off on the bus after saying our goodbyes to Maranatha, what an experience we had!!  I can't figure out what all to write here to describe it all, but truly I will never forget this village and the people, and especially the children!!!

As we head thru Ndola to get some snacks and whatnot at Shoprite, we actually shopped thru the window of the bus.  It was football season (soccer) and Zambia was going to play Uganda the next day, so we bought some of their teams jerseys to support them.  =)  That was so fun bargaining throught the window of the bus HA HA HA!!

We get home and have dinner and have a debriefing about our experience here.  We all talked about our time here and the wonderful memories we will have, we all shed some tears and talked about how we would love to do this again.  They told us we were the best team that came this year, we all got along great and since all of us had different nurses backgrounds that was truly a help with all the patients that we had seen.  I believe in 2 days we saw 400 patients or so, not bad for the 6 nurses doing all the assessments!!!  YAY guys!!!

Hard to think we will be leaving soon =(

Hugs talk more soon