Awesome first clinic

Today we had our first clinic in the town/village of Rogova. We got up and moving around 9:30 am but it took us much longer than we thought to get there. It was supposed to take 30 minutes to get to Rogova (according to our trip leader who tends to be off on his estimations) but it took just over an hour. The road was closed at one point due to a wreck and since it didn't look like it was going to be cleared anytime soon, we drove off the road and went through a bumpy alley and hill as a detour (we literally got bumped out of our seats and almost hit the top of the bus at one point). When we got to Rogova, the church where we were holding the clinic was already about halfway full.



After moving a lot of the furniture around (through the windows), we created a pharmacy area (in a closed off room so they could not steal the medicine), and intake area, two doctor's offices in the back, and a kid's area on the stage. While everyone set up their specific spaces, I kind of wandered around seeing who needed help since I didn't need to set much up yet. Once we started, Elena (a former teacher) and I started passing out toys and encouraging children to color with us on the stage. After being organizing for about 20 minutes, the grandmothers and mothers started crowding around our toy suitcase and pressuring us for more toys and also sending in random kids from the street. It was like this for about 2 hours of on and off crowding around that area and it was hard to tell them no but we only have enough toys for 1 per kid. While that was going on, there was also chaos on the stage with a ton of coloring and noise. I pulled out some washable paint pens and started face painting and then I had a crowd of kids around me nonstop for the rest of the day asking for dogs, cats, flowers, butterflies, girls, and boys to be drawn all over their arms and faces. A few of the children helped translate some of the designs for me so I'd know what everyone was asking for! Finally, when we cleaned the stage up around 1:00, we aired up two of the soccer balls and went out back for about 2 hours to play soccer, volleyball, and hopscotch. Two teenage girls were there and understood some of our English. They also learned some Spanish from the telenovas here and so Elena and I were talking to them in Spanish for the rest of the day! They were a lot of fun and we played so many different games with them. We told them we were coming back tomorrow to see them in the choir and play the mandalin and they were pretty excited!



As I was trying to sneak inside for lunch, one of the girls pulled me aside to show me her English homework dealing with the present tense. We talked for a bit and then I managed to make it in around 3:00 pm for lunch. After lunch, I went back out into the main part of the church and did a lot more face painting as well as blowing up balloons and hanging out with the teens some more. Everything started to slow down around 4:30/5:00 and there was a slow trickle out until about 6:00 or so. Of course while all of this was going on with me, the doctors and nurses saw 253 people with a wide range of issues (some of which included TB, hepatitis, and worms...). There was good organization throughout and everything ran pretty smoothly. It was chaotic at times though with the children because we had all the mothers smothering us and even had to call over Jon (a guy pretty much serving as our videographer for the trip) to come over and help with crowd/child control!

When we left Rogova, we went back to Rica and Kathy's house for dinner and we all just talked about our favorite people or issues of the day. One of the toughest things I had to do today was consult with a mother about her autistic son. Paige (one of the nurses) came out to get me this afternoon to see if I could offer suggestions to a mother about what to do with her son. When I came in, she was crying and had just run out of patience (she had two other children as well). The child was high functioning but incredibly hard to engage (he would never connect with me). Since I knew they didn't have access to beneficial toys or services here, I gave her a few ideas and I also let her know that all parents like this feel frustrated and helpless (this was all through a translator). Paige said it also really helped when I told her that her child was really smart (I did a little sequencing assessment in the room), so hopefully she left with a little boost of confidence in herself as a mother. For dinner, we had pork chops (which I thought was chicken), cucumber and tomato salad, mashed potatoes, and these great apple pastries for dessert. We pretty much left right after dinner (around 9:15) because everyone actually wanted to have an early night for once! When we got back to the hotel, Schantile checked me for lice (I saw a lot of flakes and stuff in the hair and some of the children were hugging me throughout the day). After the lice checking (I was good), I got a french braid! I also had her check out my ankle that I twisted and it's a little swollen so I'll be wrapping it tomorrow to prevent further injury.

The plan for tomorrow is to get going around 9:45 am and we are going to do a last minute clinic at the church in Severin until lunch. Then, we are heading back to Rogova around 4:00 I think for a church service or a choir performance or something like that. Afterward, we are just heading back to the hotel for another "early" (i.e., 10:00 pm) night. I just posted new pictures from Day 2 on Picasa so check it out http://picasaweb.google.com/JELeventhal/Day2# Normally I post more pictures in my blog posts but since I'm on the Romanian site, the formatting is all weird and it's a lot more trouble to do them here.

On a side note, it's 11:00 pm and this is the earliest I've be done for the night so far! I'm about to head upstairs, take a shower and then I might actually be in bed by midnight for a change!!!