Night shift and access to the transfer drive!

After a mere 3 weeks onboard I've finally found the ship's intranet file folder with the ships pictures of the nurses and patients, so I get to share now! It's night shift onboard the Africa Mercy, my bunkmate Annette from Switzerland is with me on D ward and Debra Andrews is manning B ward - quite masterfully at that :-) There's loads of snoring going on around me and pretty much only the babies are restless. Bless them, a lot of them have had their cleft lips and/or palates repaired and still have packing in their noses and can wake up pretty fussy... can't blame them. 

These two first pics are ones that I just love. Can you blame me? Patients and nurses.
Me and Hannah with two of our patients and our ward translator.

 General Surgery patients, nurses and translators. B Ward all the way!

This small boy has stolen my heart. His name is Assouma Tama and only speaks Tchokossi, which is one of the tribal languages from the northern regions of Togo. So our translators are quite ineffective against this. It cracked me up the other day when I asked his mama, via sign language... and I mean, not anything official, just motions... how it is his arm came to be in a cast - 'cause we didn't put it on on the ship. The lady three beds over cottoned onto what I was trying to get at, translated it from into Ewe for another patient to translate from Ewe to Tchokossi - long story short, he fell off his bike, but it took 3 translators! The translation came back to me in sign too; motions of bike riding with arms pumping, and boom! Giggles all around the ward. The surgeons fixed his lip and he's now fast asleep in one of the beds behind me, steristrips off, sutures out, and looking quite the handsome little fella.