catandica

catandica was the place where i was both, the most amazed and comfortable and the most skittish! it was a fantastic place to end my data collection experience. i became good friends with the tecnica of surgery there and her 8-year old son (who calls me tia ana--so cute!), but the remote location in the mountains and gorgeous environment makes it the perfect place for absolutely ginormous insects and arachnids to flourish. i spent my last night there terrified that a spider the size of my palm (ok, half the size of my palm, but that's still really big!) would jump onto my face during the night. i was right to worry! the morning i left, i opened my eyes to see one of the scary, hairy and striped fellows crawling directly above my head on the ceiling. i shot out of bed, got ready in record time, and scooted out the door. i'm just not good with creepy crawlies that are as big as rodents.

but, that aside, catandica was simply awesome. it's a sleepy little town in the mountains with no bakery (my tecnica friend has to buy bread in bulk from chimoio, some 2 hours away by car), one restaurant, one gas station and a huge street market with vendors selling all kinds of goods in little stalls. it's incredible. the hospital was wonderful. the tecnica runs it with ruthless efficiency (she's a very caring clinician, obsessively making the rounds through all the wards) and doesn't take any crap from any of the nurses, clinical assistants, administrative people and aides she has to manage. i was amazed by how much responsibility she has. she's the only clinician trained to perform surgical procedures in the entire northern half of the province of manica (usually these hospitals serve a district but she serves 4 districts: a huge, remote area), and all emergency cases in the area get brought down by ambulance for her to treat. she also has to maintain all the hospital records, data, and deal with human resource management issues. makes my head spin.

so i'm very motivated to doing a good job documenting the rural hospital's surgical caseload and costs so we can get our reports and papers out and distributed to the health ministries of the countries we're studying! the idea is that the personnel at these hospitals are overworked and underfunded yet have good outcomes for their patients. that's certainly true in catandica.