Royal Training Hospital

I don’t have photos of this but another thing that we did was to visit the Pediatric Ward in the Banjul training hospital. It was very different from hospitals at home, the facilities and hygiene practices were very different – but there were so many more patients. Each ward was a room filled with beds with children and their families sitting on the bed – the mothers brought their own home cooked food in to feed the children. The most distressing ward was the premature babies. It was quite scary to think that if Nic had been born in the Gambia he certainly would have died. In the ward there were two tiny little babies that were just being weighed. One you could see was really struggling to breathe on its own. It was like when you have a baby lamb on the farm that has just been born and you know it is not going to make it – it is sad that it is a fact of life for people here, just like it is on the farm. The saddest thing is that there is no generator for that ward so the children who are on breathing machines can die when there is power failure – and power failure happens frequently.