Hello again!
I seriously can't believe it has been 42 days since I left
the US! Time has gone by soooooo fast! Only about 2 weeks left until I head back
home and then only another 3 weeks until I fly back to Cornell.
Lately, we have just been relaxing and working on our lead
poisoning case study. Last week was slow because Monday and Tuesday were
holidays, but we actually got a TON of work done on our case study. It is now
around 20 pages long and if it turns out good in the end, we might get it published
by Cornell or Dartmouth! That would be pretty cool to say I had one of my
papers published (would definitely look good on the med school apps!!). We have
also been watching a lot of movies and playing a lot of cards. We have almost
exacerbated the amount of movies each one of us had saved on our laptops. We
have been buying DVD’s off the side of the road, you can get very obviously
pirated DVDs from people off the road. Watching the movies are pretty
hilarious. Each one of them have subtitles that are completely off the actual
words from the movie. It is literally the funniest thing ever. The movie would
say something like “Hello, how are you?” and the subtitles would say “You there
are good, no?” We are assuming that they had the English subtitles translated
from Chinese or Japanese (since the DVD covers are in that language) and so it
is very off. Chris recently taught us how to play Rummy and so we have been
playing that non-stop whenever we are home.
Over the past week, we were supposed to be going with the
medical students to various industrial sites around Lusaka. However, our
community medicine coordinator was not very coordinated this week, and they had
not informed most of the locations that we were supposed to be coming by.
Monday we literally sat on a bench for 4 hours waiting for the medical school
bus to take us to these industries. This kind of summarizes what we spend most
of our time doing: waiting. Waiting for the medical students to show up,
waiting for professors to show up, waiting for the bus to show up, waiting for
the people we are supposed to meeting to show up…it has been a great experience
for me to learn exactly what “patience” is.
Anyway, once the bus finally did arrive (claiming that the
keys were lost over the past 4 hours and that is what we didn’t leave at 7:30am
like we were supposed to…), we headed off to the Lafarge Cement plant. Once
there, we waited another 2 hours for someone to speak with us…only to find out
that the Minister of Finance was there and therefore we could not go in to
speak with anyone today. So we headed back to the medical school. Tuesday we
proceeded to do almost the exact same thing as Monday. We waited for only 3
hours for the bus this time, and then we headed off to TAP, a cement
manufacture company, directly next to Lafarge Cement. Someone actually met with
us here and proceeded to tell us that they primarily manufacture products with
90% cement and 10% asbestos (as in the asbestos that has been proven to cause
lung cancer and has been banned from almost everywhere throughout the world…).
To say the least it was interesting discussion, mostly with the medical
students asking the man why the company still uses asbestos. Oh well, it is
Africa after all. He told us that almost everywhere in Lusaka still uses
asbestos so it didn’t matter that they still produced it (?) (wasn’t exactly
sure where he was going with that one haha). After this man talked to us for a while
we took a walking tour around the plant and the manufacturing facility. Following
this, we headed off to the Taj Padmozi Hotel in Lusaka. We had a tour around
the hotel grounds and looked at several rooms. The entire time we were there
all of the medical students kept asking why they were even there….I mean they
are medical students at medical school and getting a tour of a hotel. We were
struggling to see a connection to medicine from walking around this hotel. One
of the students, David, kept asking me why we weren’t seeing patients in the
wards or in a clinic, and I completely agreed. I think that their community
medicine rotation during the 6th year really should be altered. It
makes all of the med students feel like public health is a waste of time and I
would have to agree after going through the program this week. I feel like I
could design and organize their program better than what they have now, but
again oh well…there isn’t really much that I can do.
After the hotel, we were told that all of the other industrial
sites we were supposed to visit today and the rest of the week declined that we
could come. Therefore, we had the rest of the week off and that’s why currently
I am sitting at an internet café at the Arcades, a mall we often go to near our
house.
Other than the severe disorganization of the community
medicine program, everything else has been great. I am definitely enjoying
myself and will be sad to leave Zambia in 3 weeks.
One great thing about Zambia has been meeting new people
from across the world. When Jess and Mo went to Livingstone they stayed in a
hostel where they met several people from the UK. Once back in Lusaka they happened
to run into the same people again and exchanged numbers. So yesterday, we all
met up with them. Their names were Jack and Habib, and they just graduated from
Lancaster University in the UK. Habib is actually from India originally but
grew up in Lusaka. So yesterday they picked us up from the Italian Hospital and
we spent the day at Habib’s ranch right outside of Lusaka. It was a really
relaxing afternoon and his ranch was very nice. He told us that he has a few
ostriches running around the ranch, so were really hoping to catch a glimpse of
one of them. After having lunch and hanging out at the ranch, we went home for
a few hours and then went out to dinner with Jack and Habib. I really wish we
had met them sooner because they are both leaving this week. Jack left this
morning to go back to the UK before he moves to Boston in august (he already
promised us that he is going to come up to Cornell to visit, but I may be able
to meet up with him in Boston seeing how my sister, Jessica, just moved there)
and Habib is leaving for Dubai on Friday.
Well that’s really all for now, Chris wants to leave this
internet café so he is forcing me to get off the computer haha
Until next time,
Jenn
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