Update: Work
Posted By Sika on October 2, 2007
Work
For the last two weeks I have been doing my orientation at the hospital, which is why I haven’t had much of a presence online, besides the connection problems, with which wakko, Shannon, and pearl helped quite a bit. I still get transport to and from my house everyday, but then instead of being on campus, working on my lectures and/or playing spider solitaire, I spend the whole day next door in the hospital. I have now completed half of my orientation, which consisted of a week on the pediatric floor (or paeds, as those strange British-types spell it) and a week on the male medical ward. I have a couple of stories that I’m going to tell in separate entries, but suffice it to say at the moment that it has been a very intense experience. I actually start lecturing in about a week and a half.
On the bus to and from work, greetings are very important. As each person gets on the bus in the morning, they say, individually to each other person, “Mwadzuka Bwanji?” (How did you wake up?) to which the appropriate reply is “Ndadzuka bwino, kaya inu?” “I woke up well, how about you?” Eventually, as more and more people get on the bus, this gets shortened to “Mwadzuka?” “Ndadzuka, kaya inu?” the questions and replies overlapping in a muted cacophony of hellos. But the greetings happen all the same, even if they are shortened.
I frequently find myself starting business before greeting properly, and then, at the look of, hmm, reluctant tolerance for my azungu ways, I pull back, do the appropriate greetings, and then continue the business after I’ve observed proper etiquette.
One thing that this orientation has helped me to realize is that I am not going to work in a hospital again if I can help it. It took all of 2 days before I started dreading work just as much as I did before I came to Africa, and as horrible as it can be to be in the hospital here, it was really all about me and the way I have always reacted to hospitals.
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