Mary Westfall’s Blog

International Women’s Day

Today is International Women’s Day in Zambia…something I’m pretty sure the USA should participate in :-). I guess technically yesterday was the day but today is a national holiday since it fell on a Sunday. In honor of the holiday the church women led the service yesterday and incorporated several female singing groups and a nice drama.

Today we had ward rounds and a nurse was helping me wash my hands between patients. You have to understand that the water that comes from the tap in most places of the hospital is unfiltered and therefore potentially contaminated with bacteria, parasites, etc from the water from the dam. For physicians to wash their hands between patients the nurses set up a little stand on wheels with a basin, soap, and a container of filtered water. To wash you dip out water and pour it over your hands into the basin which is hard to do on one’s own, so sometimes a nurse or someone will help by pouring the water. Anyway, the woman who was helping me was actually a nursing student, a younger woman probably in her early 20’s. I was complimenting her on the wisdom of having a day to honor all women (thinking that our version, Mother’s Day, is geared toward one category of women) when the young woman was interrupted in the midst of agreeing with me by the “in charge” nurse. This older woman, the “madam” as I hear her students calling her, told the girl, “what do you know of it? You are not a woman yet!” I had to laugh inside because here, as most places, the line between a being a “girl” versus a woman is very much in the eyes of the beholder :-).