Legs pain, waist pain, head pain....

Part of the trip to the dispensary in Mwika was along the main road to Kenya. The sides of the road were very steep and high. Someone said were dug by hand.

We saw a lot of older people today. Many are bent at an almost 90 degree angle—the result of a lifetime of manual labour in their fields. They complain of "legs pain" and/or "waist pain" (which really means back pain). One of our medical staff (Jeff I believe) dubbed this condition "Kili pain".

There is really nothing that medical can do for these folks except tell them to stop working in their field (like that is going to happen) and to give them paracetamol.


Part of the challenge at this location was the fact that the language spoken by many of the older people was Chagga, not Swahili. Luckily we had a couple of translators who could speak Chagga.

Queue for doktari

For what ever reason, there were a lot of people jumping the queue again. They seem to be obsessed with advancing in the line. Several times as we were watching the line, people would simply walk out of their spot and push their way into another spot. Right in front of you! You tell them to get back to their place in line and they smile and sheepishly go back to their spot. (Adding "Bouncer" to our CV's)








Transportation for patients to go to the hospital

 Some of the patients seen, a few older people that could hardly walk (don't know how they even got there), a couple of people with eye problems that we transported to Kilema hospital to see a specialist, a woman with suspected inflammatory breast cancer.

I was asked to bring my camera into the "gyne" room to take pictures of one poor woman's breasts. She was being refereed to our surgeon, Mark, however our caravan doctor wanted the pictures available so Mark would have a bit more info on the matter. Later, after viewing the pictures, Mark diagnosed the condition as Paggets disease which is rare form of breast cancer.

Today a dog walked into the area in which everyone was waiting and plopped itself down. We found that African dogs all look like the same breed. In Canada we are so used to seeing many, many different breeds of dogs, so its weird not to see that here.

We warned NOT to pet or even approach any of these dogs. We are assuming that they have a streak of "wildness" in them.










Once we stopped triage, we managed to snap a few shots of a couple of the medical rooms in this dispensary.