So I was reminded by a friend recently that I have fallen behind on my blog posts. I apologize for that. It has been an incredibly busy few weeks. I have been helping out with the vaccination campaigns going on in my community, which means I go door to door, or in the school with the nurse vaccinating kids. Right now, the campaign is for polio, rubeola, and somethnig else I can´t remember and it´s for kids between the ages of 1 and 4.
Honestly, it was been a very entertaining couple of weeks. The first day of my experience was going into the preschool for the vaccinations. The kids are usually generally excited to see us, and this particular day wasn´t any different. They just didn´t know what was coming to them. Since I am where I am, having a parents consent isn´t always necessary for vaccinations. For example, if the kids had a neighbor picking them up to take them home that day and the neighbor said the Mom wouldn´t mind, then we did it anyway. The poor little guys were crying and calling for their moms that weren´t there...it was really really sad and chaotic. In fact, when the nurse´s son turn came up, she looked up for him, and we all watched as he had taken a hard start running across the field. He was determined his Mom was not going to vaccinate him, but she took off running and caught him.
Later that same night we decided to go give more vaccinations ( I do not vaccinate kids, I register them and talk to the moms about the vaccination) and we were walking around neighborhoods when we came across a party (it was right before mother´s day weekend). And the Mom´s were celebrating and cooking with their kids. So there were tons of kids, and my nurse was super excited. I felt bad, we were basically going in to ruin a party, which is what we did. When we left, all the kids were crying and the Mom´s were rocking them in chairs saying how the nurse was a bad woman. It was funny actually, and we got a large number of our quota down that day because of the party.
Other days of vaccinations, we would continue till after dark, and since a lot of people in my community do not have electricity, this interesting. Fortunately I have a small flashlight on my cell phone and it could illuminate things just well enough for the nurse to get the needle in the skin. At times she demanded the moms get their kids out of bed for us to vaccinate them. That is right...we vaccinated sleeping babies! The reason we have to do this, is because the Mom´s are even scared of the shots, and they claim they will bring the children the following day and we never see them. From experience, my nurse knows this and has to be so demanding.
Then, there are really persistant Mom´s. The other day my nurse and I were standing outside a home arguing with a Mom for at least 20 minutes, she was really convincing us that her kid had recieved the vaccination later that week. She was doing a good job until my nurse asked what color card was left behind for her with the date of the vaccination, she said yellow, unfortunately for her it was blue. So we then vaccinated her screaming 4 year old.
Later in the week we went back to visit the preschool to hand out the vaccination cards to the kids to take home to their Mom´s. This time, when we entered, it was nothing but kids crying. They were scared that we were there again. Poor little guys!
So this campaign has been interesting, and it´s almost done. The best part of it was that I got to meet more people in my community. I even noticed over the past week or so more people know my name and greet me in the streets. It will be great for my work!
Now for the not so great news....as if giving shots were good news. I was on my way home the other day from the city, and some jerk went into my bag and robbed my charging cables for my computer, ipod and phones....and stole my hard drive which practically has my life one it, photos, letters, presentations, all my movies and itunes stuff. I was devastated. Because some of my valuable workw as stolen, and now I can´t use my computer or ipod. Fortunately little by little I am replacing it all. However, that day was crazy. I thought I knew the guys that did it. They rode in the back of the station wagon taxi where my hiking bookbag was on the way into my town. So I went to the police station in tears and the police road me around searching for the guys. Once we found them they searched their things and bodies, and recovered nothing. The police weren´t convinced they didn´t do it, but at that moment they had nothing. I was able to file a police report and hopefully my insurance will take care of things. There were a few other suspicious people I came across that trip, so really my things could have been stolen anywhere. It has just been really frustrating and I have had to change the dates of meeting until I can recover my work. So because of all this, I am so late on my blogs. I will try better next time!
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