biking trip and ...

A short update tonight. This week is a bit of a mess, so at the end of the week more news.

Today we met the day volunteers that we will work with during this outreach in the hospital and gave them an introduction.I manned a station that informed the day volunteers about isolation precautions with two others. Other stations were focused on serving food, washing hands, how to use the washing machines and what type of waste is going were.This evening we had open house for the hospital. We provided many crazy, fun activities, so the rest of the crew could take a look at the hospital. It was a nice evening and I must say I'm really tired and will go to bed soon.Tomorrow we will have a fire drill on board where we use simulation patients in the hospital and then do an exercise where all patients from the hospital need to be evacuated.After that the screening process will start for me. With another nurse, Laura, I am assigned to do the pre-pre-screening. That means that tomorrow night at 22:00 we will go to the stadium where the big screened is held and start with the first selection. We can not force people to leave the queue, but we can recommend them to leave when they have a condition that we can not do anything about. Around 5:00 in the morning the actual screening starts and we hope that peace and order in the queue that is formed during the night. It is something so big, with thousands of people ... emotional and sometimes quite heavy. It is still a big prayer request to pray for peace.Sunday, the first patients will come on board and life as a real nurse begins.



 We slept in a nice place at the lakeside and the next day we took a canoe to Togo Ville on the other side of the lake. After that trip we biked another 28 km back to the ship. Quite some physical exercise, but it was nice to get away from the ship and enjoy a piece of Togo.



This week we will make the final preparations for the patients, with first the screening this Wednesday.

A very big hug &Blessings

Maaike

Last weekend I had a wonderful break. Together with three others from the ship, I cycled to 'Lake Togo' which is about 28 km away from the ship. I was convinced there was a nice place a little further and made the others bike another 10 km with me to Aneho ... and back.