Northern Provincial Hospital

 

The hospital in Luganville is on top of the hill behind the town and generally has the benefit of a cool sea breeze. It has recently been refurbished by the French and is clean and bright with good equipment.
The hospital has good nursing staff who are knowledgeable and  have a good standard of nursing care. There are several nurse practitioners who run the operating theatre, anaesthetics, out patients, diabetes and hypertension and emergency. There is three Nivanuatu doctors, a surgeon (just back from 2 months leave), a reproductive health specialist and an opthalmologist. Dr Fred is a locum American surgeon who generally lives in Fiji, 4 Chinese doctors a physician, a paediatrician, a surgeon and an acupuncturist (who are all a little elusive and practice some unconventional medicine).

Patients lining up to register in OPD

In Out patients there is Dr Dastura a Phillipina doctor who came as a UNV volunteer 27 years ago and never left, 3 NiVanuatu Nurse practitioners and myself.
The patients pay about £2 a consultation (Taxi fare is £1.50) which covers consultation, investigations and medicine and we see each by number as in the old fashioned pre appointment general practice.
The patients have classical Family practice problems of respiratory infections not getting better, back problems, stomach ache, fever and gynaecological problems. There are a few cases of malaria and many tropical sores with even cases of some yaws. Inevitably there are a few people with colds for a day or two wanting antibiotics and certificates.
We have excellent Xrays available with 30 minutes and also ultrasound. The laboratory gives an excellent if limited service and again results are available within an hour or two. I saw one patient wit Dr Dastura and 2 hours later had her blood tests, chest Xray and Ultra sound results on the table. I have never had such a good service in 30 years of practice!!!!

Patients often sit outside as it is cooler and of course there is more room for the relatives who do a degree of the caring.
Fortunately the walkways are covered which protects from the sun and the occasional tropical downpour.




I am getting by with Bislama which is similar to Solomon Pidgin. However I am having difficulty in working out what the differences are. My deafness doesn't help when trying to sort out some of the more intricate social domestic problems. However everyone is very tolerant and encouraging. I am being involved in the Nurse Practitioner training school which is very rewarding.

Sometimes things are not very clear and it takes a while to understand why something happens or the normal way of doing things. This road sign at the entrance of the hospital kind of represents this. It makes sense if you stand back and see what was intended but looks odd at first glance.

Our Garden

(Double click on the photo to enlarge it)

Entrance to our Garden

                                                                                

Crown of thorns - like slugs a real pest!

Our Home

 Our beautiful house is on the road out to the airport so we have the very unexpected side effect of traffic noise most of the day. (I want to get that in first  before you look at the rest of the house!).
From the plane it is where the road comes close to the sea in the distance just before Luganville.
For the adventurous go to Google earth and enter the coordinates
15' 30' 53.49S
167' 12' 6.92 E

It is situated up on a hill side looking over Second channel and is right next door to the owners Kalmer and Louisa Vocor. He is an interesting man, ex schoolteacher, ex Member of Parliament, Chief Scout, and a senior member of the establishment. They now spend more and more time in their village.
We think that one of Annie's counterparts managed to 'arrange' the lease no doubt as an inducement for us to stay.

The balcony is a haven except in the middle of the day when it is too hot and we retreat in to be under a fan. It looks across to Aore Island and there is usually a cooling sea breeze.

The house is fully furnished and with large fridge and fans. We have been able to give back our setting up allowance and just supplement the equipment with some new plates and cutlery together with other 'essentials' like whisks and hand liquidiser for juice.

 The bedroom has a magnificent view over the channel. We seem to be acclimatising and did not need the fan on last night.

We have at last been connected to the internet!!!!

View from our garden

Visit To Vila

We went back to Vila for a VSO session of updating, more Bislama and reporting about the projects. Rupert was also included! Vila was very busy and noisy with traffic jams of almost empty minibuses looking for customers!
Port Vila is an odd place. The town is orientated around the rich expatriates who dine in good restaurants, buy smart clothes and furnish their houses with imported goods. Most of the shops are run by Chinese who are generally lazy sellers. The Nivanuatu seem to be confined to the market place and there did not seem to be one Nivanuatu owned store in the centre.
(Sorry, having problem with the photos jumping all over the place)

There is a very attractive Parliament building built by the Chinese, a good Cultural centre and some fine old colonial building hidden away in gardens. There is significant apparent corruption in land deals and when the Minister of Lands announced he personally was going to examine over 2000 land deals going back twenty years he was promptly moved to the Ministry of Justice.

The water front is pleasant with stalls selling objects for tourists, the Numbawan cafe with excellent vanilla milk shake and a good view of the setting sun and a boule ground where people gather in the afternoon to pass the time of day and speak French.

There is a large supermarket Bon Marche  which sells an amazing selection of French cheeses like Morbier and Cantal and has a huge selection of french wine priced at £10 plus a bottle due partly to 40% import tax. One can buy most things except what one really wants like a cafetiere (for the lovely coffee from Tanna island). However the story goes that the Chinese man who owns it has a cartel in Vanuatu and nobody is allowed to price less than Bon Marche, also some odd story about how he may have got a monopoly on rice importation just after independence etc etc.
Emma , one of our volunteers involved in catering, is not impressed about the way the Nivanuatu staff generally are treated. A local five star resort apparantly charges $100 for a massage and the masseuse gets $1.50 an hour with no tips allowed.

We bought three cases of wine before we left and asked them to ship them up on a boat. They said the Christie Lee would leave that night to arrive on Monday morning. It never left or arrived and we thought the wine had been drunk and crew were disabled then the following weekend we read that the Christie Lee had been impounded for illegal entry from the Solomons and for illegal trading. |Oh dear over £200 worth of wine impounded in Vila. How to get it out? Then next day we hear it was no longer impounded due to the intervention of a Minister of Utilities! So it arrived in Santo 10 days after we entrusted our boxes and lo and behold the box of wine is bought out of the hold having been cushioned by tons of copra.