What is it exactly that you DO do?

(those able to identify this quote win a travel-sized bottle of DEET)

So…what do I actually do here? Ok, a brief rundown of the day, if you’re interested:
1. Get up, thrash out of mosquito netting
2. Wait for shower (four people who all start work at the same time share one bathroom)
3. Have cereal (fake cornflakes…that’s all we’ve been able to locate) and instant coffee out on the porch (heaven…I’m telling you)
4. Go to the medicine ward, or the Kopp, as it’s known, which is maybe a 5 minute walk from here, depending on how hot it is outside, to start rounds at 7:30. (Actually on Wednesdays and Fridays there’s a grand rounds type of meeting/presentation, where someone presents a topic or case to the staff, which starts at 7:30, so then rounds are after that.)
5. Round with the team, which consists of two doctors, 1-3 nurses, and me. There’s a little cart that we drag around that houses all the charts (really, cards the size of half a sheet of paper in plastic covers that have seen better days) and order sheets (for labs and x-rays and such) and a bottle of alcohol for hand washing and a trash bin and even a little vase of plastic pink and flowers. Next to every bed there’s a wooden board hanging on the wall with a spreadsheet that includes the patient’s vital signs (with the temperature graphed, so you can see its trend with a quick glance) and medications. It’s so simple. Patients get taken care of, medications get ordered and given, vital signs get taken and recorded, and there’s none of the triplicate record keeping that keeps rounds at home dragging on till 1pm.
6. Off to the Polyclinique, which is a giant waiting room with small exam rooms off of it. It is normally anywhere from 90-110 degrees in the waiting room, but, blissfully, the exam rooms have window air conditioners. See patients until noon or 1.
7. Have lunch from 12-1, then a break from 1-2:30
8. See patients from 2:30 to anywhere from 3:30 to 5:30, basically until they’re all seen. (Top reasons for coming seem to be: hypertension, AIDS, fever and headache and/or body aches [treated as malaria, even if the blood test for malaria is negative], and tuberculosis)
9. Go back to the Kopp, where it is now approximately 95 degrees after the day’s sunlight has run its course, and record all the lab values that came back during the day, as well as see any new patients who were admitted.
10. Either do yoga, or run, or sit in a tired and hot heap on the chair in my room directly under the fan.
11. Dinner is at 7 exactly. If you’re not done by 8 there’s a stern talking-to from the ladies who work in the dining hall (who are, I must add, all very nice).
12. Putter around until bed, either watching 30 Rock (a favorite pasttime around here), or going to the lab to use the internet, or going to the nearest town to have a beer, or removing large bugs from one’s room, or duct-taping the screens down, or hand-washing clothes, or…you get the idea…there’s always stuff to do.
13. Go to bed, rinse, repeat…