Premiere semaine de stage....

Hello all again
This week was our first official week at the medical center (well we only started on Tuesday but at least we were doing something!).
It is quite hard to communicate with the professeur because he is a very busy man and has little time for us so he still doesn't understand what a physio does (here they call it kinesitherapie like in France) so he keeps saying "allez les masser la".... WE ARE NOT MASSAGE THERAPISTS!?!? Anyways, in his mind this week he had to go in our respective domains to get a feel of how they do things here. We are lucky and unlucky in a way to be in such a facility because we get to see how kinesitherapie is done here (normaly this stage is suppose to be in an area where there are no physios and we actually bring help to those in need.... here they have a physio wing with equippement an all....) but then again the 2 guys working here are really nice and we get to chat with them about physio stuff and other general things in the way of life here! Our scheduel wasn' very busy.... we "work" from 8 am to about noon and then go back home for lunch and nap and come back the next day. Many things are different and although they know many things they are not very up to date in certain areas... so it is a little frustrating to see them work with little children.
Children here are not used to playing like children back home, toys are rare and mother don't carry them around so they don' use them in therapy either and just let the babies cry while they work.... it seems almost barbaric to me... we have seen many cases of polio (vaccination are available but not mandatory and yesterday was actually the beginning of a campaign at the center so they were going around distributing polio drops to young children), we seen many stoke patients and other things we would never see at home ( a little boy that has trouble walking because other kids had violently thrown rocks at him at school ...).
However the objectif of our internship is not quite to work with these patients but to work with the malnourished children. So next week we will try to start our project....
Anyways, there is also of course the whole nutrition centre CREN (Centre de recuperation et deducation nutritionnel) and the SMI which help the mothers who's children are a little, moderately or severely malnourished. Those that are admitted in the program have to come everyday to get weighed and checked, they have certain types of milk and enriched "bouillie" with crushed peanuts and a soup also. The mother learn how to cook properly and are educated on what is important to feed the babies. The problem is often when they stop breast-feeding and need to give more soild foods, the babies fall through the cracks... they lose appetite and their weight diminishes.... and mothers are not properly informed.
On Wednesday, a mother came to the center with her baby and the Nuns (which are in charge of weighing the babies an all) were very unhappy because she had come 10 days ago with her severely malnourished child and was told to come back everyday for feedings and check-ups. However the mother had misunderstood and had come back only 10 days later... the 7 month old baby weighed only 3 kg. She promised to come back the next day.
When she arrived the following day in the office to get her baby weighed, she was crying and holding her tiny baby in her arms. Everyone realised that the baby had died that morning, strapped to his mother's back as she was headed to the center. That is the reality of malnourished children here.
Unbelievable that children still die of hunger in parts of the world.
Hopefully someday it will cease to be a reality in the third world...