We leave today for the internally displaced person (IDP – basically refugees within their own country) camp. We leave behind an area of great need but great goodness. We saw clinics in villages where we were the only source of healthcare. If we were not there, the villagers usually can’t get to the hospital due to lack of transportation (no public transport), poor roads and risk of attack on the roads.
The clinic days were long. We would leave our hotel at 7:45 and not get back for dinner until about the same time 12 hours later. Communal dinners are a great way to socialize and the food was good, but we wouldn’t get back to our hotel rooms until about 9:30. Not much time to chill. Except in the clinics. Half of the clinic buildings did not have heat and in the remainder, the heat was inadequate. With sub freezing weather, water had frozen in one of our triage areas. As a clinician, you had to work with your 4 layers of clothes and work through the same on the patients. Even with my electronic stethoscope, we had to have people strip off layers before we could examine them. It often took us an hour or more to adequately warm up after clinic.
The weather here is a little colder here than back in Kansas City with subfreezing high temperatures and lows in the teens. However, this area of the Ukraine doesn’t have the snow that the Midwest has been experiencing. The skies are generally clear and sunny and we haven’t experienced the fog that we saw in November. Once we get to Cherkasy, it will be a few degrees cooler but with the advantage that the clinic areas are heated. I suppose that blackouts due to Russian attacks on the power infrastructure are possible, but we haven’t experienced that on this trip.
We will have two days of clinic in Cherkasy before we head back to Kyiv. The trip is already feeling short
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