So a few weeks ago while I was teaching the A, B, C’s to my 5yr old pre-school class, the director of the school came in and asked me to come outside to meet someone. That someone turned out to be Magatte Dia, the aunt of a kid in my class, a St. Louisiene who currently lives in Philadelphia, PA. After an interesting discussion about her experiences in Philly and her impressions of St. Louis after living abroad for 11 years, she noticed by Penn EMT shirt and asked if I would be interested in working with her to help organize volunteers for a free clinic that the Confederation des Saint Louisiens d’Amerique (CSA) was setting up for the population of Sor, the region of the city that I live and work in. So I gave Magatte my name and phone number and promised to ask around for some other volunteers to help out, not really sure if I would hear about the project again…
Last Wednesday, however, the director of the school again pulled me aside and said that Magatte was on the phone asking to speak with me—she asked if I could meet up with her and the other coordinators the night before the clinic to set things up and determine the spatial arrangement of the clinic. Took me a little while on friday afternoon to find the school where the clinic was held (Khayar Mbengue, a beautiful old school in Sor that dates back to colonial times) but once I found the place, I was greeted by Magatte and several community organizers, busily cleaning rooms, discussing the flow of the clinic and other strategy. Magatte quickly filled me in—there were 38 doctors, nurses and pharmacists en route from Dakar and she was expecting 300+ patients from the local community to be arriving at 9am the next day. The school offered a perfect space for the clinic, with a spacious interior courtyard where patients could wait their turn to visit with the doctors as well as multiple rooms where several doctors could see 3-4 patients at a time with total privacy (essential for the gynecologists especially). We decided that color coding the patients to separate out those seeking the various specialties would be a good idea and so purchased colored tickets for each person—the patients were therefore not only given a number but also a color as they entered the clinic so that they could be more easily organized once inside the courtyard. All in all, I felt really good about the direction that our planning had gone after leaving the meeting that night.
The next day, I arrived at the clinic around 8am and was impressed by the number of people already waiting outside for us to open—the color-coding system was already in place and people were clutching their tickets just waiting for the doctors to arrive. We spread mats and set up chairs for the older patients inside and started to set up the patient care rooms for the doctors. I had come with two friends, Josh, a volunteer from South Carolina, and Cheryl, a volunteer from North Carolina, and our basic job as the clinic opened was to manage the patient lists to ensure that people were being seen in order of their arrival. One would think that this would be a challenging job, but the patients were remarkably patient, even as the hours stretched on and the morning became afternoon. All in all, this was one of the best-run, easiest to manage free clinic experiences that I’ve ever had. The doctors were very enthusiastic about being in St. Louis and I had some pretty amazing discussions about health care and the state of public health in Senegal with them and other volunteers. I’m just very glad that we had the opportunity to work with the CSA and to help out with the clinic—if you’d like to see pictures, you can click here to access the facebook photo album that I created (there are too many pictures to post up here!)
Other than the clinic, everything is still going pretty smoothly here. Finished my last week of work at the pre-school on friday and so will start working full time at Espoirs de Demain tomorrow, which I am super excited about. The only bad thing at the moment is that I have a cough that just wont go away. I’ve jokingly started to refer to it as TB, but I am pretty sure its just because there has been alot of wind lately and the air is full of dust and sand. Also, yesterday Josh’s ipod was stolen from a bar while we were playing pool with Chris and Pierrick, which put a damper on the weekend….
Miss you all! Im super accessible by email at the moment, thanks to mike bringing me my laptop, so drop me a line sometime!
