MUCPP Day 4


Today at MUCPP we did basically the same thing we did on Monday, Day 1. We picked up Elizabeth and our body guard and drove around to many houses checking up on people. The way that they pick which houses to go into are based off of whether or not the doors to the house are open (which usually indicates, especially in winter, that we are welcome to come in), and/or if there are people standing outside. Almost the entirety of the day was spent speaking in either Afrikaans or Sotho, so I was not able to communicate with the people like I had done on Day 1. However, I stayed as involved as I possibly could without speaking the language or understanding much. The first house we went to had an elderly couple living in it. The man was diagnosed with TB. We weighed and measured them both and calculated their BMIs. The man was underweight and the women was fine. We gave the man two tins of supplements to use because we knew that the health center was running low.
Another home that we visited had a very sad story. There were many people living in it. The woman that we spoke with in the house told us that she had a sister who passed away from HIV, and had left behind two children for her to care for, one of which was HIV positive. That child qualified for ARVs, but when she had taken the child to the clinic she had been sent away because the child's surname did not match with hers (since she had been married) and she did not have the proper birth certificate for the child because it had  burned when the child's previous house caught on fire. Susan had never heard of this surname rule and was determined to get the child a new copy of the birth certificate and call the clinic to help this child to be put on the proper medication that he deserved. We spent a lot of the day working with this family and making phone calls.
Last, we visited one woman who had an adorable 10 month old baby! The woman was HIV positive, and thus chose to exclusively formula feed her child (even though health care workers strongly suggest breast feeding regardless of HIV status). At this time the child is HIV negative. We took a look at the child's growth charts and she was perfectly placed at all of her check ups on the 50th percentile line, which is great! Although this woman had been to the clinic many times for immunizations and check ups on her child no one had ever explained to her what this chart actually meant, so she was not aware of how well her child was doing. We explained this to her and she was very happy! The baby was making noises and faces almost the entire time that we were there, and it was nice to see such a happy and healthy child!