Though I’m already back home in Houston, I want to share one final post about my last week in Lesotho—it was very busy!
On the Monday of my final week, Vani and I journeyed over to Phelisanong, a center for orphans, disabled and vulnerable children, and children affected by HIV/AIDS. We heard through a contact that the center had broken equipment that could use fixing. When we arrived at Phelisanong, we found about 30-40 wheelchairs in varying states of disrepair stored on the roof of a large, thin-walled metal container, which served as a classroom. We felt that by swapping out good components among the whole lot, we could come up with a few more functional wheelchairs (i.e., take a good armrest from one wheelchair and transplant it onto another one that has everything but an armrest). It was challenging work, but at the end of the day, we were able to come up with 9 functioning wheelchairs, more than exceeding our initial expectations. I also want to say that I was very impressed by the husband and wife team running the center; the center is superbly administered, and under their leadership, a library/computer lab has been set up for the children, and staff hold village level education workshops and operate a community health clinic. All the brainchild of the wife, a Basotho with a very warm heart.
The following day, we engaged the children living around Maluti Hospital in a beautification project. Vani and I came up with the idea after we discovered a mutual appreciation for art. We decided to involve the kids rather than doing the work on our own because we wanted to give the kids ownership of the work, get their creative juices and confidence flowing, and show them the importance of taking care of their community and self-initiative. (We didn’t want them to fall into the all-too-common trap of expecting foreign aid to do everything for them; we would provide only the paint and words of encouragement—the work, we will do together as a team.) We sanded the old rusty see-saw at the primary school’s playground, had the maintenance staff replace and re-weld the broken axle, and painted it all a beautiful orange-red. We then invited the kids to paint a mural to hang at the entrance of the playground. The leader of the bunch came up with a Sesotho name—“Lithaba”—which means, “mountains.”
I mentioned in my last post that I was able to translate the repair instructions for an electric scalpel unit from Spanish to English. Armed with the instructions and an oscilloscope, we were able to work with the hospital engineer to narrow down the problem to a malfunctioning zener diode. We’ve emailed the manufacturer with our findings, and hopefully they’ll be able to guide us in how to proceed from here. The scalpel unit is very important for the surgery department, so hopefully the unit will be fixed soon. While I was busy with the playground project, Vani also led a workshop for the nursing students, teaching them how to fix faulty blood pressure cuffs and how to make plastic bottle inhaler spacers.
In the final couple of days, we wrapped up all of our remaining projects and gave an internship summary presentation at the weekly doctor’s meeting. We also set up a collecting bin for water bottles (for the bottle inhaler spacers project) at the nursing school and made a pictorial instruction guide for the maintenance staff.
Thank you for following my blog! It has been a truly eye-opening experience. I feel like I’ve learned so much, and I’m very much indebted to all the wonderful people I met along the way who helped make the internship such a memorable experience.
-Eric