St Mary's Hospital

I was very excited for today… we would be visiting our first South African hospital! I chose to go to St. Mary’s hospital, a semi-public hospital about 20 minutes from the SIT house (to give you a little perspective, the SIT house is about 15 minutes from Durban city center).

When we first arrived at St. Mary’s, we were given a tour of the hospital, which included a children’s ward, labor and delivery, palliative care for those with HIV/AIDS, operating rooms for minor surgeries, an outpatient clinic, a PMTCT clinic (PMTCT stands for prevention of mother to child transmission, and is a program so HIV positive mothers don’t transfer the virus to their babies), and a ARV (antiretroviral) clinic. Even though the hospital wasn’t very big by American standards, I still learned a lot.

The most shocking difference I saw in the hospitals compared to American ones was that in every ward, patients did not have their own rooms, and were instead kept in wards with about 20-30 other patients. Besides a few select isolation areas for patients with severe infections or burns, they were all generally in the same room together. After our tour, we went to the children’s ward to play with the kids and help out the volunteers and nurses. There were about 16 children in the room we were in, with another 3 kids in the burn room, 4 babies in the birth-3 month room, and 2 in the isolation room. Out of the 4 babies in the birth-3 month room, 2 had been abandoned by their mothers. The hospital said that because the adoption process was so long, the children would probably remain at the hospital until they were a year old. The kids in the burn room were also really interesting- all had been scalded by hot water- one of the volunteers told us that burns on children were very common in South Africa.

Of the kids in the main room, roughly half were babies and the others were between 5-12. We generally didn’t know what they were there for, but the nurses told us that most of the babies were suffering from kwashiorkor (severe malnutrition) or HIV/AIDS. The babies were so tiny and fragile, but we all spent some time holding them and walking around the room. The older kids were very energetic and excited to have some new faces to color and play games with. It was hard leaving the children’s ward without taking all of them with me!

Tomorrow I’m heading to an NGO called One Voice, which has something to do with HIV prevention in teenagers- I’m not really sure exactly what yet. I’ll be writing lots this week as we keep traveling to all these new places :)