My First Day at School

After 9 months of bumming about I’ve finally started working again! My first day in the School of Nursing however was all a bit of an anti-climax…We arrived, neat and tidy in our uniforms, but way too early for Morning Worship so we sat on the benches like a couple of Norma No-Mates for a while until everyone else came in. After some praying and mouthing the words to hymns we don’t know, we zipped along to our offices, ready for action - but our Boss Lady told us she was off to the dentist and that we should spend the day organising our des-siks. I wasn’t quite sure what to think and even at a stretch, sorting my collection of pens and blank paper was only going to take 10 minutes, so what to do after that? I felt ever so flat. We managed to kill a couple of hours though and then decided to go onto the wards to introduce ourselves to any students we found. There weren’t that many actually as not all of them do their placements at Malamulo, the 2nd and 3rd years get split up and disappear off to different places because the hospital is just not big enough for all of them to do practicals here. I suppose in a way its quite good they get to see how other places work but everywhere is so far apart that it must be quite disrupting moving about so often. The ones we did find though were very sweet and did a pretty good job when we asked them to introduce us to their allocated patients and tell us what they were up to that day.

The rest of the week continued pretty much in the same vein with not a whole lot to get our teeth into really. We had a faculty staff meeting which was good and our ‘Journal Club’ idea seemed to go down quite well – we’d like to try and get some professional development things going quite early and make sure we can meet regularly with the team and get them involved in updating practice etc etc. We also met with the College Principal and Registrar, who were both very nice and enthusiastic. Everyone was quite excited this week as there were a group of Americans here from a University called Loma Linda who were casing the joint and doing a bit of a needs analysis thing as they will hopefully be helping with funding and some of them will be coming back next year to do some work here. The hospital is 64 million Kwacha in debt at the moment and although I’m not sure how this compares with other similar hospitals, but it really does need help so that it can continue to provide all the people round here with the services they so desperately need. We found out too that there are plans afoot to try and convert the College into a University! Apparently I’ve been appointed to the Taskforce to assist in decision making over curriculums and things – bit of a surprise since I’ve only been here 5 minutes and don’t really know whats what yet, not even the subjects that I’m going to be teaching. Well, except for the endocrine and nervous systems, which Boss Lady was very quick to off load. I can feel some swatting up coming on! Ali has been given most of the Trauma module but shes letting me do Poisons, Bites and Stings which I’m quite excited about!