I was about to write a whole post to complain about the logistical absurdities of this place (the refusal of locals to accept anything other than absolutely mint US currency, bribing police, learning to drive on these ridiculous roads, getting ripped off at the petrol station, et cetera, et cetera…) But I looked over my posts to date, and I realize that everything I’ve written has been about the novelty of this experience; the nearness of war, the strangeness of my relative luxury, and just general weirdness. It must sound like I’m treating my presence here as travel-as-extreme-sport.

So, instead, I’m going to write about my actual work.

First of all, I’m working at HEAL Africa’s hospital. I’m focusing my efforts on the recently-constructed HIV Pediatrics Ward, which is currently distributing anti-retrovirals to 200 children and educating HIV-infected mothers on how to avoid passing the infection to their children.

There are scores of surgeons, doctors, and nurses (Congolese and visiting foreigners) who are doing all the real work. I hope to put in a key piece of support for them; a system that will keep track of their patient data. If it works as expected, it will allow them to provide better care for the kids and for their funders (PEPFAR, The Gates Foundation, Global Strategies for HIV Prevention, etc.) to analyze the impact of donations.

I include the photo, above, to put a more human face on the situation. The infant-sized child you see is actually two and a half years old. Believe or not, he’s gained a lot of weight in the few months since they put him on anti-retrovirals (ARVs). The reason why his mother brought him into the clinic is that, unbeknownst to the clinic doctors, he was superinfected with tuberculosis when he first came in. Now that his immune system is kicking in, his body is fighting back with everything it has. This is a low-quality screengrab from a video I shot, but you can probably make out his massively swollen lymph nodes. The doctors were discussing which medications to treat him with, next, since there can be some nasty interactions between ARVs and TB drugs.

I was grateful to Arthur Ammann and the boy’s mother for letting me be present during his consultation. As the medical jargon rolled past, I had some time to just sit with the kid and extend my calmness to him; he was clearly scared by the strange muzungu doctor (Arthur), which just made his labored breathing worse. Not everything that NGOs in this part of the world works out for the locals. But it feels to me that, even in in this massively under-resourced place, things are clearly trending positive. Hopefully, what I do will be a part of that.

On the Goma Student Fund front, I’m hashing out the budget with the Congolese board. We’ve figured out how the year should run, and the kids started the fall trimester on Monday, last week. I’ll head out there some time next week to drop in on classes. In the meantime, here’s a photo of the board, the teachers, and me:

I’m also taking care of a lot of odds and ends. One important piece of the puzzle is getting a wireless mesh network over both campuses of the HEAL Africa facilities. Melissa Ho came through a few weeks ago and set up six Meraki routers, but the key outdoor link went down right before she left. Bizi and I are troubleshooting it and trying to hack together a fix. I include a screenshot of the Meraki dashboard because it’s a tight UI and because there’s a satellite photo of the facilities where I’m working:

Consider yourselves up-to-date

And, for those who are just coming across my blog and feel like reading more, you can start with my first post in the Congo and read forward, from there.

Related Posts:

• Feingold on the D.R. Congo (October, 2007)
• Contributing to Wikipedia: My Drop in the Bucket (December, 2007)
• N’Dombolo (September, 2007)
• Seeing in Color (October, 2008)
• Nagu Clusters (January, 2009)

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 3:20 am and is filed under goma, personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.