Load Shedding

Once I arrived in Cape Town I quickly learned the term "load shedding" and its meaning. About 1 hour after I arrived all the power in my homestay went out. This power outage was a scheduled outing that occurred multiple times a day and was referred to as load shedding. This had been occurring for a few months before I arrived and there still is no plan for it ending. To the people in Africa this is an occurrence that greatly inconveniences their lives and adds regular challenges to their days, however they took on this inconvenience with such a positive manner. The entire concept was often a subject of jokes and utilized as an opportunity to come together and help one another. The family I was with would tell me that they as a people have suffered many challenges over the years, but that they are people who dance and sing when they are sad and struggling and that was extremely evident over the course of time I spent there. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What I've Learned

 A month does not seem like a substantial amount of time to make an impact on an individual person, however I have found that a month of traveling to a different country alone is like a pressure cooker for individual change. You are forced to be incredibly self sufficient, you interact with so many new people on a daily basis and many of these people are from different cultures. You constantly have to think about your own culture, your own identity, your strengths and your weaknesses. You need to solve your own problems or at least be able to identify who can help you solve the problem. In addition, being in a completely different hospital system, quickly needing to identify the different needs of the system and the patients can be quite challenging, but in the same way it forces you to think more about our own system and identify the advantages and weaknesses of it. 
Read more

Post-rotation

 This experience has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. The organization of the program is fantastic. The opportunity to stay with a family is one of a kind and truly gives you an amazing immersive experience in a such a short amount of time. The hospital taught me so much about ways in which our own system could better utilize the resources we have and change our way of thinking when it comes to managing patients with minimal resource availability. By far my favorite part of this program was getting to make friends from across the world that I know will last for a lifetime. 
Read more

Pediatric Surgery

 This is my second time working very closely with pediatric patients in the hospital. Before I started medical school I worked at Nationwide Children's Hospital as a patient care assistant. I remember this being extremely challenging because of seeing children in such bad conditions and in such bad health and also seeing their parents have to watch them and feel so helpless. This field and this specialty is extremely challenging, but what is so important is the difference it can make. My role is only as an international student here, but I am able to spend time playing with the children in the wards helping them to make friends with the other children and to help keep them feeling like children even when they are sick in the hospital. For anyone interested in this specialty or interested in this rotation, I think it is important to know that it does take an emotional toll and many people you talk to can tell you how it has affected them and how they try to cope, but the most common
Read more