Day 9 (Friday)

Today was a long day of clincal, class, and relationship building. We started the day off by a disaster management and preparedness lecture at the Post Basic College by one of their nursing tutors. Following our lecture we had tea time (which we all still love) and then went to the Lady Ridgeway hospital for clinical. We all were split up onto different floors, and began to do physical assesments on children. At the end of our shift, we went to visit the Ministry of Health of Sri Lanka. This is their national head of healthcare, which was a very big honor. We met with him and spoke with him about their healthcare and the similarities and differences. He is well respected and a major part in reforming the health care system in Sri Lanka We discovered that he recuits nursing students to enroll in his school and pays them 150 dollars a month to attend. We informed him that we paid large sums to attend our school- which he laughed about! We got our picture taken and will most likely be in the Sri Lankan newspaper! Following our visit with the Minister of health, we headed out to Pizza Hut. It was a nice treat. The pizza was deleicious, but included chicken sausage as the meat on the pizza! It was interesting.  After that we sat in rush hour traffice to come back to Sumadra Sri. It was a long day and we were excited to come back to the orphanage and relaxed. We came home to clean rooms and fresh laundry- it was a good day. We are excited for the weekend which involves rest and relaxation.