Today we had our visit to St. Thomas hospital to visit our instructor Dr. Msuya and to see where he practices. St. Thomas hospital is a privately owned hospital in Arusha and they see approximately 80-100 patients a day. When we arrived to the hospital at 10:00 am, the waiting room was already packed full of patients waiting to see Dr. Msuya. He is an OB/GYN and serves a good majority of the pregnant women in Arusha. We were given a tour of the facilites by one of the workers in the hospital. It turns out that the health care center used to be a nightclub that was very popular in Tanzania and people from "all over East Africa came to visit." Now the health care center contains two inpatient wards, an eye care facility, an outpatient clinic, one theater or surgery room, a labor and delivery room, and a laboratory. We were able to tour the theater that was very interesting. We had to take our shoes off and put on designated flip-flops to enter. We were unable to look into the theater itself because the doctors were finishing up a c-section and there were not observational windows. We were shown the autoclave and the area where deliveries are performed. In the delivery room, we were able to see the baby that was just born from the mom undergoing a c-section. The baby was wrapped in a kanga and kept warm using a heat lamp. 

We then spent an hour in the clinic where there were giving vaccines to newborns and then another hour in the laboratory of the health care center. It was so interesting to spend time in the laboratory because of my job. They had one machine to do CBC's that was routinely turned off by the sporadic power in the clinic. They stained all of their slides by hand and reused all of their pipettes by dipping them in a solution which I would assume was alcohol. There were able to do urine analysis using the same test strips that we have at work (for my coworkers reading) but they were read by hand instead of by machine.While we were there, the laboratory tech showed us a person that was just diagnosed with malaria that day (much more common than at work :) ). It was just so different from what I am used to at work, but I think it was good for me to see and to appreciate all that we have. After visiting the hospital we went for lunch and had nyama choma (grilled meat). It was very good and it was nice to visit a local restaurant.