What an amazing first trip! It was so nice to be able to put faces to all the names I have been talking to over these past few months in preparation for our trip. The team welcomed us with open arms and were so excited about having us there.
Harrison is in charge of the hospital and I was able to have a few meetings with him about the hospital’s hopes and expectations with this trip and moving forward with our relationship. Janet is the head nurse in charge of the operating room, and she is quite a boss (in a good way)! Janet keeps everything so incredibly organized and is able to answer all my questions.
We were able to learn a lot about each other during this trip. Dad had to learn that things move at a different pace here; for example no matter how much he wishes people would start surgery at 0700 am, they just won’t! We decided in order to adjust to this, we would do both pre and postoperative patient rounds in the morning to allow the operating room staff time to prepare the rooms. We also split our team so that some of us did rounds and some of us helped to set up rooms. Dad, in turn, was able to do a lot of teaching. The medical officers here are trained to perform C-sections, but no other surgeries, so we showed them all the steps to hernia repairs and hope at some point they will be able to perform simple repairs on their own.
Two of our more outwardly life changing surgeries were lypoma (growth of fat on a patient) removals. In the United States most people get lypomas removed when they are the size of a small nut because we are able to remove things for cosmetic reasons. Each of these lypomas were approximately ten pounds! One of the patients had it on the back of her thigh, making it difficult for her to sit. The other patient had it on the back of his shoulders and he was unable to wear a shirt because of this. Both patients had huge impacts on their lives from these lypomas and it was so amazing to see the difference immediately.
We learned that the Kinondo Kwetu Trust was so excited to have our team visiting that they fundraised to help cover the hospital and patient costs while there. I have never been a part of a mission trip where the local team was so involved behind the scenes, I am confident that our trips will continue to be successful in the future and continue to improve with each visit.