Time flies when you're having...fun?

Time has started to speed up here, it feels like - how is this already our 4th week in Angola?  It seems crazy that we have somehow been here almost a month, I'm making plans to go home for Christmas, and that life here is starting to feel almost, almost normal. For the last 2 weeks, I was rotating in the outpatient sickle cell clinics, seeing newborns and older kids; the sickle cell screening lab; and doing outreach with the "maternidades". This week, I've started observing rounds with the inpatient empyema ward. Yes, there are enough kids with chest tubes due to severe pneumonia and pus collections in their lungs to warrant having their own ward and service. It's nuts.  Empyema happens in the US - but it would be extremely unusual to have 30 kids in the hospital at the same time with this condition. Here, every single morning during the presenation of overnight admissions, 2-3 new cases have been put in the hospital.  We have a suspicion that a good percentage of these kiddos might have Sickle Cell Disease and just have never been tested. SCD causes susceptibility to what we call "invasive bacterial infections", especially by certain bacteria that cause these bad pneumonias, meningitis, and blood stream infections.  Our main goal in the newborn screening project that we are starting here is to give these children prophylactic medications and vaccines that can prevent these infections.  I am hoping to get a closer look how these kids are treated while in the hospital, and how we can intervene to help prevent these kinds of infections from happening in the first place!  It is unfortunate to have to see so many sick kids, but knowing that I am working on ways to help aleviate this kind of suffering in the future really gives me some hope about what our project can some day accomplish.