A Trip to the Clinic

Thanks to the Chardon Rotary group, there is a fund for the health of the students. While spending time with the children we started to notice that many of them had a common head fungus, so we decided to collect children from the four youngest classes and take a trip to the clinic.

We went classroom to classroom to collect the students that looked like they may need some treatment. Then we made one big line of 31 and headed into town.

The new clinic in Masindi has been built and sponsored by a group from South Carolina. They will stay for three years and then hand everything over to the people of Masindi. Currently, there are three Americans helping.

When we arrived, we had the children sit in three benches in the waiting area.  The nurses weighed each student and took their temperature. Then they would move to the benches outside the doctor’s office. I would take them one by one into a room to be checked by the doctor. He was very kind and worked well with the children. I have found that many of the men are very nurturing here- maybe even more than the women.

Once the students were checked we took their paper to the cashier and they moved to one more set of benches where they would wait for their medicine- topical or oral or both, depending on the severity of their infection.

The last little boy I took to the Dr. had boils on his legs. His treatment was done by nurses in another room. He was about 5 years old and cried and cried – I felt terrible. Finally, when they finished I had him get on my back so I could carry him home.

Here the women carry their young children on their backs with a wrap around their waist. When I invited the little boy on my back he didn’t wrap his arms around my neck like children would in the states. He settled in and we took the mile walk back to school together. It’s an experience I won’t forget- and now I can be thankful ,when I take our future children to the doctor, that there aren’t thirty-one children along.