A Day in the Life

I realized that I have not written anything about what a typical weekday looks like for me here, so I thought I would walk you all through one.

The alarm rings promptly at 6:20, but there is no need to ever use the snooze button because if I don’t get up then, the church bell rings at 6:30 for at least a solid minute. I hope that no one in Wau likes to sleep in because there is no chance of sleeping through that bell. In typical Catherine fashion, I’m ready to go approximately 3 minutes after getting out of bed. I greet our dog, Grigio as Taylor and I leave the compound. We make the 2-minute walk to our local parish, St. Joseph’s as we marvel at the always-beautiful sunrise in the distance. We take our usual spot in the church in the 8^th pew on the left. Mass is celebrated by our Salesian priest neighbors.

After mass, I have my breakfast of two pieces of bread with butter or jam and hot tea or instant coffee. Taylor, Marta and Ania all have to be at their respective schools earlier than I need to be at the clinic, so I enjoy some alone time with Jesus before I have to go to work. I arrive at the clinic by 8:30 and make sure the notebooks are set up to keep records for the day. I then help Nura sign people in. She writes their information on their ticket while I write it in our record book. After helping her for about 30-45 minutes, depending how busy we are, I go into my own consultation room and start seeing patients. I get assigned a nursing student each week to be my translator. The patients come in and I ask about their symptoms and do a quick assessment when necessary and then send them to the lab for whichever test I think that they need. As they get their lab results back, they bring them to me and I diagnose them and write their prescriptions from what we have in our pharmacy and write it all down in my charts. (Yes, nursing friends, paper charting is sometimes still a real thing.) It all happens very quickly because I usually see between 30 and 60 patients each day. If there is ever time without patients because they are waiting for their lab results, I usually get a quick Arabic lesson from the nursing student. I’m talking elementary stuff here, numbers, days of the week, simple greetings etc. Whenever I have seen all of my patients, I help with some record keeping and preparing things for the following day. My co-worker’s 4-year-old daughter normally comes to the clinic after school so we have some bonding time while I finish my work. I usually help her practice writing her English numbers and letters. She is very smart!

After work, my time is filled by different things- practicing ukulele or guitar, reading, attempting to practice Arabic, working out in my room, playing with Grigio, or doing any work that the sisters need me to do. At 6:00 the bell rings for prayer. We join the sisters for rosary and evening prayer and on Wednesdays we have Adoration. After prayer, is dinnertime! We eat together as volunteers in our community room, except on Wednesdays when we eat with the sisters. The night after dinner always slips away accompanied by good talks, jam sessions, and preparations for the next day.

At approximately 10 PM I turn the lights out, tuck myself into my mosquito net and drift off to sleep to the sounds of unnamed African critters.

Looking back at this post, it’s not the most entertaining, so here is a precious story to liven things up a bit:

Last Thursday, I gave the “Goodmorning” talk at St. Joseph’s school morning assembly. This is Salesian speak for a short talk to give the kids something nice to think about during the day. The next day a girl from the fifth grade class came up to Ania (who works at St. Joseph’s) and asked her if she knew me. After Ania said yes, the girl said, “wow, well she really is beautiful. Can you tell her that she is really beautiful?” It made my day and I thought it was very complimentary to what I was saying in my last blog post!

I have been keeping everyone back home in my prayers and I ask that you do the same for me. I also ask for prayers for peace and growth in South Sudan as this country tries to build itself up. If anyone ever has specific prayer intentions, please message me, so I can pray for them!