#4 An intro to the Solomon Islands
Ok everyone, thought y'all might want a Solomon island update. First off BM was a raging success so... I know y'all were wondering. I know you were.
It's been a very "interesting" past 24 hours. Visited the hospital today which is their big regional hospital. Did some c sections, taught the locals the proper way to position a patient for a spinal. No joke. And had some Australian medical students do their first spinal. So first off these Solomonese.... Solomonians...Solomites or whatever you call them people are amazing. Super nice. Extremely meek and quite. So Much so that they don't speak up when they don't like something. Very polite and stoic people. Basically the opposite of me so I was like a bull in a China shop to them. Well... we don't like China so a bull in a Mexican onyx store. Anyway these women just sat there never flinched when they were being poked no complaints. It was crazy. Interesting fun fact about them is most of them don't know their own age at all. It's an estimate and they use known events to approximate their age such as uprisings, riots, or major sporting events to guesstimate their age. Crazy. Deodorant here is unknown. Shoes are always optional much like my kids, and when someone is sick and in the hospital the entire family shows up. So there is a mass of humanity just sitting around all over the hospital.
The health care system is very poor. They do with what they can which isn't much. One of their biggest problems is with consumables such as suture material, needles etc. They run out of all that kind of stuff. Certain drugs are a luxury such as some pain meds and even anti nausea meds. Women never get epidurals for normal vaginal births. They don't have the manpower or supplies to do anything continuous like that. They never put nasal cannula on unless absolutely necessary because again it's a consumable. Nor do they put EKGs on because of the little sticky pads are consumable one time use. CRAZY! I'll show some pics of the hospital below.
Break. Next line. So after work I wanted to go see all the historical WW2 sites of course. So got a group together and became their tour guide telling the history of the battle of Guadalcanal. So you have ti think of the battle of Guadalcanal as the D Day of the pacific. It was the first land battle against the Japanese. This was the first time we fought them on the ground and the Solomon islands were the furthest south the Japanese conquered. What's crazy is the American marines landed August 1942 but never finished clearing Guadalcanal of the Japanese until February 1945. 21000 Japanese died and less than 100 were taken prisoner because they wouldn't let themselves be. Roughly 7000 Americans died on this one island. We first visited the American memorial. See pictures below. Then we drove past alligator creek where a major battle was fought (look it up) and then stopped at red beach which is the beach they landed on Guadalcanal. It was like the Utah beach of the Pacific only the Japanese were supper supposed and didn't shoot at them when they got on the beach. See pics below.
It's hotter than... well insert a word of choice here. Sweating all the time. I have a rash and just roughing it with the natives. All in all it's like that dream/nightmare you have that your back on your mission. You know the one I'm taking about??? Enjoy the pics!
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