6/25/11

Connor dragged me out the a nearby village, Bulamagi, to help with fifty circumcisions that are conducted every weekend day in this area as part of the Safe Male Circumcision outreach program. This project is funded really well by USAID. One of the perks of the whole day for me was getting to drive in a truck out to the village health clinic. Thanks, USAID! This health clinic serves one hundred thousand people. It was the size of a large house here, and had no electricity or running water. Anyway, they did LOTS of circumcisions, which I'm not really very interested in except from a public health perspective. Connor has a relationship with one of the doctors who's in charge of this project, and while we were observing the surgeries the doctors really kept pressuring Connor to perform one. It's actually a very disturbingly common occurrence for the nurses at the hospital to push us to conduct deliveries or perform procedures. I've been assisting on a lot of deliveries,, and I certainly hope that I'll be able to conduct a delivery before I leave, but I'm a little flabbergasted by the constant push to do things outside my comfort zone, which I feel is already pretty wide for a first year medical student. Notable quotes: (from a surgeon standing over a twelve year old boy who was grimacing as a large needle was inserted into his penis) "this man is a coward!" (from the same surgeon explaining why he was giving this boy a hard time) " African men know no fear of death!".