Dumela from Botswana! After a grueling two-day travel, MK and I have finally arrived in Gaborone, the city we are going to spend the next 7 weeks in. We will be working with both the UPenn-Botswana Partnership and Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative (BIPAI) to learn about health care technologies in Botswana and to assess the applicability of some of the medical devices developed by Rice students through Beyond Traditional Borders. We brought with us four BTB technologies: bubble CPAP for neonatal respiratory care, bililights for neonatal jaundice treatment, DoseRight syringe clips for accurate dosing of oral liquid medication, and Global Focus Microscope for point-of-care diagnosis/pathology. We hope to obtain feedback from doctors and nurses regarding these devices and their usefulness/applicability in Botswana. We are also working with a graduate student in Dr. Richards-Kortum’s laboratory, Tefo, to conduct a clinical study on fiber-optics imaging for cervical cancer detection.
We were picked up at the airport by Buitomelo, our student mentor who will be helping us get settled into our new home! We are accommodated in the University of Botswana (UB) hostels, which are apartment-style dorms consisting of six single rooms with a kitchen/living room. Besides a small cockroach infestation problem (eww!), the rooms are spacious and very comfortable. On our first day here, we met our new roommates, Kaitlyn, Olivia, and Julia, who are undergrads from UPenn, and Happiness, who is a graduate student at UB. Besides going to the grocery store to get some necessities, all we did for the first two days of our arrival was sleep, sleep, and more sleep. Luckily, it was the weekend and there were no scheduled activities until Monday!
At our UPenn-Botswana orientation, we met Nikki and Gill, who are the coordinators for the program. They were extremely friendly and welcomed both of us into the Penn fold, even though we were the only non-Penn students in the program. After getting more familiar with the university and the program, Nikki and Gill took us all on an incredible game drive at Mokolodi, a game park about 30 min from UB. Not only did we see some amazing animals, including ostriches, impalas, giraffes, hippos, and cheetahs (though these were captive), we were served a delicious dinner out by a lake in the park and enjoyed a beautiful performance of traditional Batswana dancing/singing. What an incredible welcome to Botswana!
During our first week, we mainly just touched bases with all of our mentors. Because the optical imaging instruments for the clinical study were held up at customs, we had to wait to start on that project. Instead, we met with the doctors and staff at the Women’s Health clinic in Princess Marina Hospital (PMH) and at the BIPAI clinic.
On Wednesday, I shadowed the nurses at Buntleng, the screening clinic. Basically, the Women’s Health clinic at PMH is a treatment clinic that takes referrals from both Buntleng (where initial screening occurs) and PMH. So to better understand the whole process of cervical cancer screening/treatment, I was sent to Buntleng to observe. And then, on Thursday, I shadowed at the treatment clinic to follow through the entire process. I will devote a future entry on the details of how these clinics function.
Finally, on Friday, we met with Dr. Mike Tolle, the associate director at BIPAI Botswana. We presented our technologies and Dr. Mike and Dr. Bri said that they might be able to set up some meetings with other doctors, especially doctors on the wards (since most of our technologies are for in-patient use). We also discussed the work we can do at Baylor over the next two months.
All in all, it’s been an exciting (and exhausting) first week in Botswana! I’m so excited for what the next two months will bring and I hope that our time here will not only allow us to gain a better understanding of Botswana, but will also make a meaningful impact in the lives of the people we meet.