A heartfelt farewell and it's time to head home!
Wow what a brilliant end to this brilliant trip to Jinja - a goodbye ceremony presided over by Dr Tenywa, Sr Margaret Oboke (nurse in charge of Nalufenya Jinja Children's hospital), and hospital administrator Louis Muhindo. Such a happy and heartfelt occasion.
I had the chance to express my thanks for the amazing welcome and support during my time here and in turn I was humbled to hear from this wonderful team how much they appreciate the support of JPIP. As we say, from small pips grow great things, and I think today's speeches showed that the small things I've done in the last two weeks are really going to make a huge difference.
The malnutrition ward are delighted to be connected to the generator - Sister Aminah told me how long they'd waited for this moment and how much it meant. And they're really excited to be getting a security cage to protect their monitoring equipment.
Of course the best place on the malnutrition ward for close monitoring of patients happens to be nowhere near a plug socket - but JPIP doesn't let things like that worry us. So with the expert help of Yazid, hospital electrician, by Friday there should be a brand new plug socket created in just the right spot. I don't think the NHS could manage to do that as fast or with as little paperwork!!
Nurse (and newly appointed Senior Equipment Officer!) Charles Etiru was pretty delighted to see the laminated 'jobaid' posters I'd made up from his PowerPoint slides. He'd been wanting for some time to make them into laminated posters showing normal and abnormal ranges for pulse, respiratory rate, blood pressure as well as GCS scoring. He was so chuffed with them that he announced he was going to stick them up with superglue!
I was completely bowled over to be given a present in a big box by the whole department.
I wondered aloud how I could be so lucky to be given a big box of sterile gloves...?? But after much teasing I finally made it through the box to find an amazing collection of clothes - a kitenge dress for me, a shirt for Nick my husband in a matching fabric, and two dresses for my daughters. WOW. How amazingly generous!
I am under strict instructions for me and my family to wear the clothes on a smart day out and send some photos back...
Thank you for your interest, enthusiam and donations during this trip - your support makes our success!
This is just the start of our 2018, so do have a look around the website for more information about big dreams and exciting new projects.
