Staff Blog
In the field with SWAPOL - Swaziland
I went out with the mobile clinic the other day. SWAPOL has two mobile clinics, each consisting of a nurse, a suitcase and a cardboard box of medications, a vehicle, and a driver. Together they serve thirty-five rural communities in Swaziland. These mobile clinics provide a service that is incredibly important because it can be so difficult to access healthcare here. Seventy percent of Swaziland’s population lives in rural areas and the the cost of transportaton to a clinic or hospital can often be prohibitive. If you can make it to a clinic, they are often so overwhelmed that you could wait all day and still not be seen. There is a severe shortage of doctors in this country, and you have to be a doctor to prescribe ARVs (although nurses can prescribe other medications), so often doctors only have the time to see patients with regards to their ARVs and are unable to address concerns of oppurtunistic infections. Because of the shortage of doctors, nurses pick up a lot of the slack. But the healthcare system in general is overwhelmed and there is still a lot of stigma within the system when it comes to treating people who are infected.
Mentoring in Swaziland
These days I’m grappling with culture. Not the shock of it, I’m over the worst of that, but it’s pervasiveness and strength. I’m aware here of how culture is present and relevant in everything we do. It’s guides us through our lives, telling us how to navigate social interactions and understand what’s happening around us. When we are in our own culture it helps us to make sense of everything. But we bring our own culture with us when we enter another. We use it to try and interpret things in our new environment the way we do at home. Let me tell you, this doesn’t always work too well.
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