Everyday is an adventure

Sarah and I have come to Masaka. Everyday we get up and head off to the hospital we wonder what we will encounter. So far we have attended to women living with HIV who are in labour. Many of these women are sick with other sicknesses as well. One mom also had Maleria and when the baby was born it was maserated, it was very sad. We have had 2 postpartum hemorrhages where we had to do bimanual compressions. Thank God Micky arrived with medications to help stop the bleeding. Some of these women may have died at home if they experienced the same amount of blood loss while being sick. We had the opportunity today to go to one of the local villages to meet some of the traditional birth attenants. They run a medical center with no gloves, no medications and no nomal saline or IV equiptment. These people need supplies. But they work without. It is unbelievale. Sarah and I have been resuscitating babies almost every day. Many midwives here have not been able to be trained in NRP, but things are slowly changing. We were on the ward in the hospital and there was no normal saline available to start an IV, we were thankful that no one was bleeding at that moment, otherwise things would have gotten scary. I am so impressed how the midwives here can work with so few supplies. They have about 2 maternal deaths a month in the hospital we are working in. We feel like we have been learning more in 2 weeks than we could learn in 1 year in Canada.