My job performance

 I was in Tanzania for 6 months. The experience of working there was extremely variable – rewarding, anxiety producing, intimidating, overwhelming, joyous.  I was told in advance that it would take 4 months to feel like I was worth having on the staff. After 6 months, I was still not sure that I reached the stage of being an asset to Selian Hospital. Some days, I felt that I made a difference in the patient care and was valuable to the hospital. Other days, I felt overwhelmed and useless. Selian Hospital has no intensive care unit so all these horribly sick people were on the medical ward. It is now still hard for me to decipher when the problem of uncertainty and difficulty in treating these critically ill people was due to me not knowing enough and when it was that our resources were so limited. I know that having a good clinical laboratory that could do a wide variety of tests including cultures would have made my job much easier, but it is still hard to not take less than stellar medical care personally. I will tell you more about adult care next time.

People ask me what my favorite African animal is and laugh when I say a wart hog.  How can anybody not be enchanted by an animal that proves that God has a great sense of humor.  It is impossible to not have a sense of humor and create the wart hog.  That short legged trot that is particularly funny when you see a group of them (what do you call a group of hogs? - I don't know.), kneeling on their already very short front legs to make it even easier to graze, so ugly - we are talking WARTS here.  Admit it.  You smiled when you looked at this photo.