Already wednesday?

I feel like I really just got here, but today's already my third full day in Sierra Leone. The clinic is a great place to be. There are a lot of things going on...

Right now it is a fistula clinic, where a surgeon repairs wounds that women get during child birth. In Sierra Leone, C-sections are not available, and this results in a lot of problems...ultimately leading to these women becoming outcasts in their communities. It's a bit intense, but if you want to know more about these problems check out the website of one of the sponsors of the clinic, the Freedom from Fistula Foundation, but make sure you're ready because it's not anything you'd ever hear of in the USA. Fixing these fistulas allows women to reenter their communities, and it truly changes their lives.

The fantastic thing is that they've fixed so many fistulas over the last few years that they are finding fewer and fewer patients. By fixing fistulas, it doesn't really solve the problem of fistulas, so the next step for the clinic is to provide a safe place for women to give birth, with a surgeon available to do C-sections, so that they can avoid the fistula all together. This also increases the amount of children that are born alive. In the clinic right now there are 34 women, and only 4 babies. That means 34 women carried babies to full term, but then 30 of them lost their child during birth. These are the lucky women who survived themselves.

I am very excited to be able to be here now, since they are working on this transition. Yesterday I helped move boxes out of the area that will become the birthing center, and today I'm working on creating some of the paperwork they will be using after the transition.

I have a few other things I'll do while I'm here...today I'm going to go with Helen, another staff member, to a school that she helped get a building. One day next week I'm going to accompany Vez, a physical therapist, as she goes into the local communities to help disabled children. There is definitely not a lack of things to do here, and I am excited about the time to come.