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Sunday, July 12, 2009
It's Sunday afternoon for you, nighttime for us. Our time difference is 6 hours ahead of Pennsylvania time...It was nice arriving here in the early morning on Saturday. It gave us a full day to force ourselves to be awake and go to bed at a decent hour. No naps that day --> no jet lag today!
It was so good to get here, and I was not as uneasy and anxious since we've been to Maputo before. The people are lovely and our hotel quite comfortable. Especially when we try to speak Portuguese, people smile...And, then they speak to us in English or tell how to say it in Portuguese. Michele and I are committed to take a language course in our future.
Once we were checked-in to the hotel, we ventured out to exchange our US dollars to Mozambican Metical at an exchange rate of 28 MZNto $1. After that we headed to the Maputo Shopping Center (clothes for Michele, a new belt for Dave).
We accepted an invitation for 6 pm dinner at Romao Xavier's home. Romao is the in-country representative for AIHA's Twinning Center, the organization guiding us in our partnershop project. How much we enjoyed the evening - meeting his wife, son and a number of others who greeted us warmly. We were served "fruits" of the sea - calamari, prawns & clams - and other Mozambican dishes. Mozambique is a coastal African country with the Indian Ocean to the east. We know that dinner will be a highlight of our trip.
In speaking with Romao's friends and family, we had the opportunity to explore consumer's views of nursing in Mozambique. It's been interesting to us that 50% of nurses in MZ are male, while in the US that number is 6-7%. When we asked them their view of nurses, each expressed concern that many who enter nursing do so because it is a occupation, with education and employment paid by the government. These words were translated to us by Romao, so there may have been pieces of the perspective picture that he hesitated to translate! Clearly their experience were not good. Of course, they noted that there are "good nurse" exceptions.
We had heard this before from ANEMO nurses, and also know that there are nurses in the US without "the right reasons" for going into nursing. However, an uncomplimentary image of nursing in MZ may be more common than we at first believed. We want to explore that consumer image piece further...we know we didn't reach the qualitative saturation point with our few interviewees! :)
Today we worked on our presentation for the ANEMO nurses' regional conference in Inhambane province. Maria had translated the PowerPoint slides for our Professional Nursing in the United States, and we worked with Romao to add some Portuguese accents to the lettering. We made copies for conference attendees and look forward to meeting more ANEMO nurses at the Inhambane conference.
I see this has gotten too long, but I'm really enjoying this blogging thing in the way that it will allow us to remember details of our trip! We've a 5:45 a.m. bus trip to Inhambane in the morning so we will be unsettled and in transit once again. I'd best close and get some sleep. More later, but it might be a couple of days before we get back to blogspot.com as we may not have Internet accommodations in Inhambane.
Later, Lori
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