Last Saturday (22 Mac 2008), I went with a group of 20 medical students into the Orang Asli village which IMU has adopted. It marked the 3rd time we visited the village since the the village was adopted last July. Our aim was to provide basic health screening and education to the villagers there.
The last time we went in was in November last year when we provided similar health screenings.
After my climb 2 days prior to that, I really wasn’t really in the mood to go to the village but since there was no one else free to lead the students in, I had to go. Sigh!
In retrospect, I am glad I did. Sure, the stuff we did were the same old thing, but to the students; for a lot of them, it was their first experience providing health care in a rural setting. The seniors were teaching the juniors, just the way medicine should be taught.
Here are some pics I captured:
I still firmly believe that adult medicine is a whole lot easier than kids medicine (a.k.a pediatrics); for instance, the health screening form for adult is merely one page long while for the children, it was 4-5 pages long! It’s also harder to get children to sit still to be questioned and examined, especially when all they want to do is to ransack the toy-bag (yes we had a few bags of second-hand toys to be dished out) and eat all the grubs prepared (and indeed, they did, thus depriving another group of students who came back late from their house-to-house visit, their tea!).
Future pediatrician?
This is how you look for head lice! Almost 99% of the children there have head lice or their eggs! At the end of the day, a lot of us had ‘psychogenic’ itch in our scalps as well! EeeewwWWW!!! Personally, I washed my hair 3 times that night!
This is what they look like, up close!
I couldn’t sleep that night after the mobile clinic. In my dream (or nightmare), I was sleeping on a bed crawling with huge beastly head lice, eating away at my flesh and I was scratching like a lunatic. In the end, I got up and watched ‘Casino Royale’ for the 10th time and finally slept at 1 am! Somehow watching Vesper Lynd’s luscious lips had a sedative effect on me!
*purrrr* “C’mon, big boy, surely you aren’t scared of teeny-weeny head lice?”
Anyway, that’s the whole bunch of us (Jimbo’s missing as he is the one taking the shot!). It was a good outing, the best in fact as we managed to screen almost 90 adults and children which is a record so far. Right after this shot, we all had to run in the torrential rain to reach our transportation parked at the fringe of the village. Most of us were soaked (a few were smart enough to bring along their umbrella-ella-ella…)! We had to make a quick dash because had we waited some more, the estate road will become too muddy, slippery and flooded and that makes driving on it very dangerous indeed! Thank God, all of us made it out safely. 
Well done guys! Please consider join us again this June 2008 in the next mobile clinic. (By then, I hope some one else will go in my place! Chronic periodic exposure to head lice is not good for my sanity).
Thursday, 270308 @ 0700
