Nigeria #1

Saturday, 9_2_2006 (Loaded Tuesday night)
I'm hoping to find an Internet café somewhere tonight to up load the latest. As I type this it is 5:30 pm and should be 10:30 Kansas time, 7 hours difference. Still have 10 surgeries to go before we head back to the hotel.
Where to start......Flights were all good and luggage made it also. It was dark, around 8:30 when finally through customs and into the bus. Spent the first night in Abuja with our hotel surrounded by barbed wire, (I think it was to keep me off the streets at night).Doris and I met Linda, Mahdavi, and Manolo in Amsterdam at the airport. Mahdavi is an eye surgeon from India and Manolo is also a surgeon but from Peru. Then Jeff the surgeon from California and Tammy a nurse from Detroit were here a day early. Fun group of people and very talented.
Friday morning it was off to the National Eye Center in Kaduna where we will be doing cataract surgery and training for the next few days. Ate a traditional Nigeria lunch with the staff and our group of 7. One of the dishes was called 'vegetable soup' and what I thought was part of a cactus leaf because of the spines sticking out was actually a jaw bone of a fish. I ate around that. Later I found out that the locals eat the bones in many of the dishes, good source of calcium???
Checked into a hotel in the central part of Kaduna which is considered to be the best in town....... Doris accused me of drying with the bath floor mat but then she had to beg the front desk for another bath floor mat so she could have her own "towel" The name is the Hamdala and our room number is 909 but on the 4th floor.....different.
Spending Saturday at the Eye Center setting up video equipment for the Doctors to view the surgery being done by Jeff, Mahdavi, and Manolo. This team of 3 are doing surgery on about 30 people today starting at 4 pm, we will be here till about 7PM. Tomorrow the Nigerian docs will do it themselves and have a tape of their work to take home. In total about 100+ people will have cataracts removed and new lens put in one eye.
Doris spent her time taking pictures of the patients just before they go into the operating room. Bye the way, the patients have been waiting all day and then walk to the surgery staging area which is right outside of the operating room. Pictures consist of a full face so we can ID them and then a close up of the eye that will be operated on, a before and after thing......Power just went out.........running on batteries for the laptop but the operating room is dark, except for the flashlights......power back on now after about 5 minutes of being off. After surgery the patients walk back to their bed and will spend the night here. Tomorrow we will take more photos when the bandages come off. It has been a very long and rewarding day.
I have set up a little work bench in an old lab area which is across the hall from the operating room and just to my right I just noticed a jar full of eyes looking at me! I'm not kidding!More when I get a chance, Nigeria is a fascinating country!!!!!!