When we finally arrived at the Lusaka airport, we were shuffled off the plane, filed through customs, grabbed our baggage, and met our driver who took us to our new house for the next 8 weeks.
Our house is a guest house for the Lusaka Italian-Orthopedic Hospital. Also connected to the hospital compound is a house of nuns! It is really interesting to see so many nuns walking around outside all the time with all the patients with broken arms or legs. Sometime during the summer I would like to find some doctors in the hospital who I could shadow for a few hours every few days.
For the past few days we have all just been getting acclimated to the area, mainly by sleeping A LOT and eating A LOT :) We have been by the grocery store many times now because it seems like we forget to get something every time we go. The grocery store we have been going to is called SPAR, which I think is based out of South Africa. It is a western-style store with all the foods and things that I could find in any normal grocery store in the US (definitely didn't think I'd be able to find one of those here!). This grocery store is at a large outdoor mall called The Arcades. We have also gone by a large indoor mall called Manda Hill (named after Nelson Mandela). It looks just like any large indoor mall in the US as well!
However, aside from these areas, the city looks very poor. You can see that many people are not as well off as the typical American, and many homes are poor. There are many vendors on the side of the road with fresh food and items to sell, and many people walk around on the streets and up to the cars trying to sell their goods. The city has a lot of trash filling the sides of the roads and the air seems very dusty. It is also obvious that there is a security problem in most places because every building is surrounded with large metal fences and gates with spikes and barbed wire lining the top. Thankfully, I feel that our house is about as safe as it could get, I mean we live at a home connected to nuns and a hospital!! Hahaha aside from that fact we also have a large fence surrounding our compound and a gate that is locked every night.
This is completely random but everyone drives on the left side of the road here!!! It is so difficult to get used to! I keep approaching the right side of the car to sit in the passenger seat and then realize that there is a steering wheel!!
Anyways, yesterday we met with the Assistant Dean of Community Medicine at the University of Zambia School of Medicine. His name is Dr. Nzala and his cousin is one of the professors at the Cornell Law School (who we all met in April back at Cornell). Dr. Nzala gave us our schedule for the week and told us to be at lectures on community medicine with the 6th year medical students for the rest of this week. So, today we attended our first lecture with the medical students. Today's topic was "Control of Lead Poisoning," which will be our focus for our case-study for the rest of the summer. The lecture and lecture hall are very similar to the Cornell ones, and I took down at least 4-5 pages of notes for the hour and 15min lecture. Tomorrow's lectures include Case Control Study, Cross Sectional Study, Cohort Studies, Psychiatry, and Measurement of Exposure; these will last from 09:00-17:00 (or 9am-5pm). Once this week finishes, I think we will be traveling next week to Kabwe, which is just north of Lusaka. There we will be studying more about lead poisoning and conducting some primary school surveys.
That is all for now, I hope I can post more often but our internet has not been working for the past several days. Pictures will be up soon!
Jenn
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