I was lucky to be able to spend 2 weeks at home in Texas over the Christmas/New Year's break, and even though it was difficult to leave my family again, it felt great to return to work excited and energized! Lately, the main projects that the other Global Health Corps docs and I have been working on include strategic planning, developing a monitoring and evaluation plan, quality control projects for our laboratory, and developing our follow-up clinic from the ground up. Our program in Cabinda is moving along pretty well - we have collected over 2700 samples from the 2 maternity centers in the city of Cabinda, and have identified 38 babies with sickle cell disease at this point. We are also building up our clinic - we saw 3 babies this past week - which makes the work so much more satisfying day-to-day. Now, we are figuring out ways to keep the nurses motivated to keep testing at the maternity centers (they are paid very little, so we try to express our appreciation as frequently as possible! In Angola, it is VERY possible, even necessary, to "buy" people's work ethic); how to spread the word within the community so that parents understand the importance of actually bringing their baby to our clinic whenever we first call to let them know that a child has been identified with sickle cell disease; and what the best next step in spreading our screening to other parts of the province would be. Lots of work to keep us busy!
We are also trying to work with other big groups who run health programs in the country to make sure that our program works with all of theirs since we overlap in some areas. For example, we currently purchase and administer a vaccine called pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) to give to the babies with SCD here. It is a vaccine that all children have been receiving in the US since the year 2000, but here in Angola it can mean the difference between life and death for our patients because pneumococcal infections are one of the common causes of death for children with sickle cell disease. Luckily, the country is planning to introduce this vaccine for all children this year!
In our clinic, we have a fun nurse named Ruth (pronounced like "root" in Portuguese) who we have started training to help educate the parents, administer vaccines, and perform heel-sticks for our blood samples. In between patients, we get to sit around and practice our Portuguese by having interesting conversations with her regarding the differences in the practice of medicine and resources available between the US and Angola. This past week, she was shocked to hear about the availability of vaccines in the US for varicella (chicken pox) and rotavirus ("stomach virus"); she told me about how the clinic nurses know the importance of measuring and plotting growth parameters like height and weight in children on growth charts, but they are unable to do it in the clinics because no one has any measuring tapes. It's always a little disheartening to realize just how much the intellectual resources are available here, but far outreach the supplies, like medications or even measuring tapes. It just makes me even more motivated to find other ways to help improve the ability of the health care workers here to provide the best care possible for their patients.
On a completely unrelated note - I have started a website/blog just for my photography here, because the number of pictures I take has gotten a little bit out of control! If you are interested, you can check out http://sarahlabuda.zenfolio.com/blog to see and hear about the most recent travels or experiences outside of work. :)
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