We’re staying at the UB dorms, which are about two blocks away or about a fifteen-minute walk away from Princess Marina Hospital and BIPAI. The graduate apartment that we live in there is made up of five individual rooms connected to a common room with a kitchen and a table. There is also a shower and a bathroom near the door.  We are staying with three undergraduates from UPenn who are also doing internships here as well as a UB graduate student. When we first arrived we headed out to one of the malls. Botswana is surprisingly more developed than I first thought.  One of the doctors at BIPAI said that Botswana is a middle-income country. The mall looked similar to a mall that one might see in a small town in California.

After recovering from jetlag on Sunday, we went to the Universities orientation with the UPenn internship program. There they explained the security system at the University and took us on a beautiful game drive that night. On Tuesday, we walked over to Princess Marina and Baylor. The hospital is made up of several different wards that are connected by outdoor hallways. The women’s clinic is located at the back of the hospital and Baylor is located on the side.  We first arrived at Baylor. Grace, the head nurse, showed us around and introduced us to Dr. Leah Scherzer, who manages the visiting scholars.  She told us that there would be opportunities to shadow on Wednesday and Thursday for one of us. Because Lina shadowed last year, I observed in the clinic on both days.

I was surprised by the success of the patients. Almost every patient that saw the doctors had excellent adherence. Very few patients had missed more than one pill and of those none had adherence below 98%.  There were many patients with asthma like symptoms due to the HIV. They were treated with asthma inhalers, which they call sprays.

After arriving on Saturday, we began to plan our schedules. So far this week, Lina and I have been waiting on several different factors to align before we can really jump in.  We met with Baylor on Friday and had a chance to talk about the technologies that we brought.  They were happy to give us names of doctors in Botswana who might be helpful. They also offered to give us time with visiting doctors from around Africa.  The doctors we’ve been working with will be on leave next week so we’ll likely concentrate on helping Tefo, the Rice graduate student, set up the clinical trial at the women’s clinic in Princess Marina Hospital