Hello to all reading my blogs! I can't believe it's already almost the end of September...each day I find something new that I didn't notice from the day before. We have begun our visits to the area hospitals where we will be completing our "clinical internships" as they are called over here. The sites include the Themba Care HIV clinic for infants & children, the Christel House Elementary school where we will be doing school nursing & health education, the Bishop Lavis Maternity & Pediatric Hospital, and the Red Cross Children's Hospital. The past few days I have seen things that were incredibly shocking, immensly sad, and also intensly euphoric. To say the least, there has been a great deal of emotion with each visit! At the Red Cross Children's Hospital we visited the pediatric & neonatal burn unit. This was really tough. There were infants, toddlers, and young children with head and face, or worse - full body burns. The doctor explained to us that many of these accidents were caused by a hot water kettle falling on top of a child who pulled on the chord, or reached up and grabbed the handle. The majority of these burns occurred in the small township houses, where it wasn't uncommon for 3 or 4 children to be running around near a hot burner. Also, it is reality that there is often no supervision, because the parents or other adults have to work in order to survive - literally. On a more positive note, we saw the cutest pair of Siamese twins. This morning myself & a few others went to the Themba Care HIV clinic. I really loved it!! The 2 or 3 sisters (nurses) were in charge of 18 infants and young children, to which they happily assigned us duties to bathe, feed, diaper, get temperatures & weights, play with, & supervise the group. The kids would cry to be held; they were absolutely starving for attention. At one point I was holding an infant in one arm, and a toddler in another, and there were a few more tugging at my jeans and telling me something. The majority spoke English, so communicating with them wasn't the hard part. In fact, a couple of the older ones had quite an attitude! Nonetheless, they were all adorable. It was slightly different though, taking care of children you know have HIV/AIDS, or past TB, or scabies, etc. Each one had a long list of health issues, really requiring a lot of attention, compliance with meds, sufficient diet, and of course a lot of love and caring.