Last day of volunteering at Casa Maria

Today was my last day at Casa Maria. It was also the first day of a lady from USA who has worked in elderly care homes as an occupational therapist in the past. She was starting at Casa Maria for 3 weeks. She had been working in an elderly care home in the centre of Antigua but had found that there were already a lot of nursing students there and they had a lot of help looking after the patients. However she mentioned how useful it had been in terms of seeing what sort of equipment would be easy to make and use with the elderly patients.

We made our way to Casa Maria and I started my clinic whilst the other lady looked around before starting the following Monday. She was very interested in long term help and starting a charity to raise funds for regular donations. We discussed the finances a bit and talked about how many of the “nurses” who were working there had not been paid for this month or the previous month – the care home struggles significantly with finances.

I spent the morning seeing many of the patients I had already seen and seeing patients with new problems. As with on Wednesday, many patients were recovering well and those with new problems seemed to mostly have minor issues which did not require any treatment as such.

The problem, I guess, will be that once I leave they will have no further medical attention until another doctor volunteers at the centre.

I spent the afternoon talking with my tandem and buying some gifts for my host mother and for the Maximo Nivel organisation. In the evening I had dinner at home and then went walking around town with Thomas and ended up hanging out at the Red Zebra for the night.