Orientation

Today was one of those "structured" days. We got up early and headed to NMMU (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University) to do an orientation of the Nursing Dept there. They also spoke about the health care system in South Africa and how messed up it is. Did you know that not too long ago, nurses only made about $15-20,000 per year? Apparently now that they've gone on strike and have been fighting it, their salaries have improved considerably, although I don't know the new numbers. The most interesting part of orientation was tea time. Yes, in South Africa, people have tea around 10:30 every morning. So we got ushered off to another room where we had tea, coffee, and food. It was awesome :) After orientation, we headed off to two hospitals: a private and a public. The private hospital looks just like how our hospitals here look. Very clean, lots of technology, decently staffed, what you'd expect to see in America. The thing is, only 15% of the South African population uses private hospitals, so there were very few patients. I think we saw 3 the entire tour. It was kind of annoying because they made us put on all the "OR" get-up: the hair net, shoe covers, gown, you name it, and we didn't even go anywhere that required such protection...we were just hot and a little miffed at the OR doc who made us wear them. The public hospital shows the very stark contrast between the two. It's huge, but that's because it's almost always at full capacity. They don't have enough health care workers so the nurse to patient ratio is very high. They don't have new technology, the floors and windows don't look nice (broken glass anyone?), but the staff are nice people who know what they're doing. I think it would be a more exciting place to work than a private hospital because there is more to do and more variety to see. After that, we came back, ate, and went to karaoke at a bar called Captain's. It was kind of fun, but it was smoky and super, super crowded. It was interesting watching people sing and watching the native South Africans do these dances to music us Americans have never heard before. Around midnight we headed back, and I started battling the internet, trying to put up some pictures on Facebook, but only had a little bit of luck.