Friday was a national holiday...

... and I woke up around 5am to African music since it was "Africa Freedom Day" – we rested and mainly stayed at home the whole day. This also happened on Saturday and Sunday. I did however call Linda Wilkinson who is an American who is my contact for the Chikambuso School Project. She was glad to hear I made it here!

Monday I met her after having lunch with Alex... a traditional Zambian meal which Nshima and vegetables. It was so yummy! I drove out to the school with her and saw some of the children who are older than at the Jon’s Hospice Daycare I was at last year. They seem to be around 8-11 year olds. Lots of young girls and I also met some of the mothers who originally started the project. Classes for women were happening at the time involving English and sewing. Everyone was very excited to meet me... the American Nurse. And, I brought some little candies with me which was exciting to the kids.

I will meet up with Linda on Wednesday to go out there again and start looking through various medicine kits which sound like First Aide Kits, but no one knows what medicines are there. My classmates from UT will be arriving on Friday so I hope next week we’re going there everyday. It was a nice place and in 2 years they have done a lot of work. It used to be a brothel and bar and there are no signs of this at all anymore.

The main activity I will be doing is small Triage/Assessments on 400 children who live and attend schools in the area. I had created a generic assessment sheet and asked Linda to make any changes necessary. She was pleased with it, but asked me to add if the child was a "single" or "double orphan"—something that all of them have been impacted by in their short lives.

This post was written by Sabrina, a doctoral nursing student at the University of Texas at Austin and SWB's resident registered nurse.

Welcome

In the upcoming weeks, this blog will be used by four students traveling to Lusaka, Zambia. The trip will be sponsored by a new Austin-based non-profit organization called School Without Boundaries. Once there, the students-- Rick, Annie, Kelley and Sabrina-- will work to get children health checkups, buy books for the local school, and more.

Stay tuned for future updates! (I'll be posting updates that they send me because their Internet connections will be spotty.)