Photos from Jen's birthday, hospital stuff and scandal in Nalerigu

I thought maybe you guys might like to see some pictures from the last month that I haven't been able to put up before with the internet being broken...

I've been looking through loads of photos (mostly taken by my lovely friends) and got all nostalgic so some of these go weeeks back.

Stargazing on my 2nd (or 3rd?) week here

A baby born with spina bifida

All the scrubs/OR sheets etc get hung out to dry. Now that rainy season is fully underway and it's raining every day we have a big problem with drying enough gowns for surgery. The local staff don't want to hang them up in doors because of they believe the sun kills bacteria (luckily they use a steriliser too afterwards)

Jen's birthday

Me + the Coppola girls made a princess castle cake

And Erin + Saly + Elaine (and possibly some other people?) made an Africa birthday sign

One of my favourite photos!

Group photo strike 2 (sadly without Caitlin... also not sure where Saly is?)

This picture sums up everyone's enthusiasm for clinic pretty well!

Chini - a TB patient who sits outside on my porch everyday... not really sure why... he's very friendly but there's definitely something not quite right up there!

The other week we went to Nakpanduri - an escarpment thing...

Standard drugs cabinet

There's one incubator in the hospital that intermittently works so normally is at full capacity with 3 babies squeezed in. Any other premies/neonates who need it end up on the paeds ward in the open.

This is a baby I saw in clinic the other day who probably has craniosynostosis - a disorder where the skull bones fuse too early causing compression of the brain

I have got some other cool pictures of medical things, but at the risk of grossing you out I've decided not to upload them! If you want to see them you'll have to ask when I'm back in England.

Actually before I go, just time for one quick, potentially gross story mwuhahaha! The other week a man came into the hospital having been pretty badly beaten up. Turns out he had been having an affair with a married women. The husband somehow found out and rounded up his mates who then proceeded to travel to his village and CUT OFF HIS PENIS!!!! So now he has no penis... this was pretty big scandal here in Nalerigu. There's even a video somewhere on the internet that everyone keeps playing. As the story goes, one of the friends who'd been assisting with the assault had accidentally dropped his phone, while being distracted by penis cutting one can only assume... For some moronic reason he then decided to go back for it and the villagers by this point had come out (presumably having heard the agonising screams of a man-minus-penis) and killed him.

Apparently the penis choppers + the women who had the affair have been prosecuted (she told her husband who she'd slept with in the knowledge that he was planning revenge), though I don't know what happened to the villagers who killed the attacker.

Anyway, hope you're all doing well wherever this meets you!

xxxx