Today in front of casualty, the queue was forming early after the long weekend.
With no benches or waiting area, patients (sometimes critically ill) sit/lie on the pavement or on remnants of destroyed chairs, slowly dehydrating and deteriorating in the sun until they can be seen.
This is just one of the reasons why we feel that the triage bay we are creating in this project will be transformative to patient care and dignity.
Today was spent stripping the walls in the resus room and cleaning it out
We were helped by Jackie (a seasoned painter) and his assistant Poeletso (who wants to study tourism with the money he is earning as a painter's assistant).
Sometime in the 1990's the windows were painted over for some reason, so Poeletso scraped them clean to get natural light into the room.
On attempting to fix the plumbing, we found the source of the rotten smell that always plagued the room...the flooring.
It was moist and partly alive with layers of slime and fungus...more dangerously, it was littered with years of needles and generalised biological waste.
We had to remove this top layer of flooring for safety reasons.
Unfortunately to replace the flooring, it will cost USD 5000.00 which we cannot afford, so we will have to leave it with destroyed concrete
A lot of hard work, but the resus room is now ready for plastering!
Tomorrow we will:
1) Plaster the walls in Resus and start painting
2) Second coat of paint everywhere
3) Start painting the door frames
4) Remove the ancient surgical lights
5) Fix the plumbing with the equipment I bought today.
Thank you Raja Hardware in Acornhoek for donating a new toilet cistern which we will install tomorrow (to replace the existing broken one).
