OB ward

We arrived safely last Wednesday into Manzini. Since then life has been flying by. I've done a couple days doing Internal Medicine and a couple more days working the OB labor ward. Although I was prepared to see a lot of HIV and tuberculosis patients it is still a shocking sight.
On a positive note, I delivered my first baby last night in the OB. It was a little girl born around 8:15pm weighing about 3 kilos. Lauren and I have seen about 10 births so far and are planning on pulling an all nighter tonight to see even more. We're also planning on going through some of the log books tonight to calculate the HIV rate of the mothers here. I would say from what we've seen so far the numbers are largely underestimated, although some of the mothers are on HIV medicines to prevent transmission to the baby. We'll see how effective that is when I work in pediatrics next week.
We've seen some babies born here that weight between 1.5-2 kilos (3-4.5 lbs) due to all the malnutrition, premature deliveries, and HIV. They don't even have proper oxygen masks to supply the babies effectively. Heart monitors don't seem to exist here, nor do defribrillators. I haven't seen an ultrasound machine, although I've heard they have them, but the tests are often to expensive for patients to afford. Even 20 or 30 dollars is way too much for a test.
Well, we're going to dinner at a doctor's house tonight, so we better get to the grocery store to buy some food to bring.