After a 2-week training period we were off to clinics on our own. Did we manage to find a good remedy for our patients? Only time will tell during our follow-ups. There is an incredible amount of concentration needed to observe the patient in front of us, listen and ask the right questions, write notes in a good format and repertorize at the same time. So luckily we work in pairs and one of us can keep notes while the other tries to play/fight with RadarOpus. We divided in two groups so our baptism of fire has been quite kind, we had about 6 patients during our first day instead of the 12 patients we'd otherwise had had.
Here you see Anna giving dietary advice to one of our patients. She is an intensive care nurse, homeopath and nutritional counselor.
On Tuesday Jeremy came with us to the Mkombozi clinic (you see him going in with a big box of remedies on the left), where orphans receive vocational education. Most of them are hiv-positive and their parents died of AIDS. After treating some children (one of them was nearly blind, another one had a hard dry cough and is 'the best' football player in the team so he got Adamas), we did a home visit to a 16year old student that was in critical condition and had stopped attending school 5 months ago. He lives with his mother, who goes off to the fields every day to earn TSh2,000 a day but she has to pay TSh500 for transport so she's only left with TSh1,500 (less than a dollar) to feed her son. This boy had so many ailments and was so malnourished that it was really difficult to repertorize his case. After much work and many sighs Jeremy decided on Bar-i and Podo. He had diarrhea so Anna taught the boy to drink water with half a teaspoon salt and 6 teaspoons sugar added to it to avoid dehydration, but they didn't even have salt in the house. Then we went off to the village and HHA got food for him. In homeopathy we have to take away obstacles to cure and oh my, poverty is such a great obstacle here! So HHA also gives food parcels to very poor families with kids, small donations to elderly people who don't have any family left to take care of them and microloans to women taking care of a lot of orphans who want to start their own business. If you want to contribute to this cause, you can make a donation. A small monthly donation of $5 or $10 makes a huge difference here and it can help the project rely on a budget for the future.
* The title of this blog makes reference to the quote at the top of my website.
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