Time passes quickly

Wrote this last weekend but haven't had reliable enough internet access to post it yet (again!)

So another week is over in Ethiopia. It’s amazing how quickly time can go here. Calum has been here for 4 weeks already. For me it hasn’t been the most eventful week ever, but I’ll fill you in on the highlights.

 Last weekend was Ethiopian Christmas. As I’ve said several times Christmas here is not like the European version. It’s predominantly a religious festival, where people go to church and spend time with their families. Orthodox Christians fast for around 40 days prior to Christmas – that is to say they don’t eat any meat or dairy products.  The fast is broken after they go to church. So on the final couple of days before Christmas several of our neighbours had live goats tied up on their balconies, bleating away. The bleating all stopped early on Christmas morning though, and apart from the odd hoof lying around there has been no sign of them since. We joined some of our Ethiopian friend for a big camp fire / BBQ on Christmas night (and of course the essential dancing) which was really good fun. I must be getting old though – I find partying 3 weeks in a row exhausting, let alone 3 nights in a row!

I spent the week at the University and hospital in Harar. I am still giving two lectures a week to the fourth year medical students covering all aspects of paediatrics, followed by 1 ½ hours bedside teaching in the hospital 4 days a week. On the morning that I’m not teaching I do a ward round with one of the GPs and  they  usually ask me to see patients they are worried about. I am still amazed at how advanced the pathology and clinical signs we see are, and often still baffled as to what the underlying diagnosis is. The thing is that very often we don’t have the facilities to make a diagnosis – it’s more of a best guess scenario or a worse case scenario as the case may be. For example everyone with a cough, fever and fast breathing gets diagnosed and treated for pneumonia. Many of them won’t have a bacterial infection, and would get better without antibiotics, but we can’t investigate or observe them closely enough to tell the difference, even if they are in hospital, so they all get antibiotics. It’s frustrating at times but it is the best option with the resources that are available.