Rest Day :)

I am currently sitting at a little internet place in Gondar, Ethiopia. We have 2 rest days here and I feel like I have earnt them.

It has been a busy week medically. Tired bodies, increased heat, gravel roads make a recipe for more work! There's been lots of riders with heat stroke as they cycle through temperatures up to 49 degrees out in the sun. It doesn't matter how many times I remind people to keep drinking, adequate hydration is always going to be a hard battle. The explosive diarrhea has started, and there's been plenty of gravel rash to patch up.

Blessing the lunch truck driver has been having issues with his visa coming into Ethiopia so he's still stuck in Khartoum - which means Mathias is driving the lunch truck at the moment.

Yesterday, even though it was a "rest day" we were working for most of the day. We took the lunch truck to get fuel and to get properly cleaned. The trucks take a beating over here so we have to look after them. We visited the local hospital trying to get my suturing forceps sterilised which I had to use the other day... The theatre nurse exchanged mine for a sterile pair but then she was asking if we had a box to put them in... which would defeats the purpose of them being sterile in the first place. We came to the conclusion that perhaps the clinic/lunch truck is perhaps cleaner than Gondar University Hospital. We tried to pick up some supplies from the pharmacy here, and managed to find most of what we needed. There's no decent dressings here, but we've still got quite a bit of stock anyway. I was also trying to find a spacer chamber for any more acute asthma attacks that might arise on the way as I gave the existing one to a client already. We have one in the Emergency bag still anyway but it would be useful to have a second one on the lunch truck aswell. They don't know what a spacer is here though even when I drew a picture. Maybe in Addis.

The rest of the day we spent cleaning the inside of the lunch truck which was pretty dusty and disgusting after the unpaved section in Sudan. Then it was time for clinic... and finally time to party!

Miles goes back home to Istanbul today which is good for him, but sad for us because he is an awesome person to have around.