Kemmel and I have had a good week knocking out some administrative duties.  Kemmel's has been working away on the pharmacy order for the quarter (and beyond) and also the budget for next year and got those taken care of.  We also received a grant recently that enables us to add on some new construction to our Clinica Caris building, so Kemmel got started talking with our building contractor about plans and costs of materials this week.  The plan is to add more storage space, freeing up rooms for dental and for medical exam rooms.  We also have scholarship applicant interviews coming up soon, so he has been contacting all the students to schedule their appointments--every year we have more interest from kids wanting to continue on to high school and even college.  This is at the same time exciting, but also worrysome due to limited funding for scholarships.  We pray that God will give wisdom to the Board as they select the winners o scholarships.
I have been working on continuing education for my board certification maintenance (fun!) as well as class material for our volunteer promoters' class--this month we study the eye and its function and diseases.  I've also been working on putting together our flipcharts for a nutrition program we are starting.  We found good pictures from the World Health Organization to add to the flipcharts and had one of our scholarship students "change wardrobes"  on people in the pictures to better represent ladies from this area. They turned out not too bad. The program will be offered to first-time moms starting during pregnacy, teaching them about proper prenatal nutrition, prenatal care, and the importance breastfeeding exclusively for the first 6 months. After the baby is born, we will continue with education about breastfeeding, child nutrition and illnesses and routine care.  The fun part, is we a looking to have female volunteers from the target communities to train to do one-on-one education during home visits as well.  These ladies will be older moms who have experiene rainsing children and now, training in nutrition.  Our goal is to involve the young mothers, their mother, their mother-in-law and the community volunteer in all of the education encounters so that we are all on the same page.  We will try to encourage open dialog and exchange of ideas so that familes/in-laws can better support the young mother.  It's a small program, but it should begin to address  the chronic malnutrition in the area on a community and family level.
Tomorrow back to clinic!