What are we going to do in Tanzania?

Many of you know where we're going and what we study, but what we exactly do is a question for a lot of people. So let me explain it to you:

first of all our study, it is not a suprise that we study nursing in Rotterdam but what does this mean? In the Netherlands a nurse is a person trained in performing nursing tasks. This includes basic care, such as personal care like bathing, dressing and changing, as well as wound care, observation, reporting and specialized care. Nursing Technical operations are, for example, the insertion of an infusion, a probe or catheter. Another important responsibility of the nurse is assisting the patient. This may involve the way a patient is coping with his disease and how we (as nursus) can improve this. Nurses often work with other diciplines such as laboratory, cardiologists, pediatrician, sports Doctors, osteopaths and dietists.
As you may have noticed, we have all kinds of tasks!

In Tanzania we aren't going to do all of those tasks. For example assisting the patient with his way of coping is difficult because the local people in Arusha speek Swahili. For me, english isn't difficult but many people in Tanzania don't have the same opportunity at propper education as we have in Europe. Maybe your next question for me is if I speek Swahili? No... Unfortunaly I'm not that good. What i do have is a little book with all kinds of important medical and standard words in Swahili. A friends gave it to me for my 18th birthday.

Let's go back to the patients, what we can do is the basic care for and with the patients, we've learned this in our fist year and we have to communicate with the patients by nonverbal expressions and sign language. It's also very important to pay attention to the patiens emotions because he may not be able to tell you if he is or if he isn't feeling alright.