Mambo! We’re Zina and Letizia, midwifery students from Italy, and we are doing our internship here in Kenya at Coast General Hospital for six weeks.
We arrived on the 22nd of July to start our internship. At the beginning I felt a little bit lost at the hospital, not knowing anybody, because everything was new and the country was new. But then I started getting into it very quickly. The staff at the hospital – the nurses, the midwives, the doctors – were all so kind. They looked after us, and it was a great time at the hospital. I got to know the culture, the people and the language. We also had Swahili lessons, which helped us a lot when interacting with patients. English is pretty common here, so most of the time we could just speak English, but with some women who don’t speak English we could use Swahili, and that was really helpful. The nurses also helped us learn the Swahili we needed in the midwifery department.
There was a lot of hands-on work, so we could really work a lot, with many deliveries at the labour ward – most of the time we stayed there, because it’s our main working place as midwives. We saw a lot of new cases and even emergencies: breech deliveries, twins, caesarean sections in theatre, and emergencies like PPH. That was very good for our learning. We also did rotations in the NICU and the Newborn Unit, which were really interesting, just to see how other departments work.
One of my best experiences was a twin delivery – the first baby was breech and the second cephalic. I’m really thankful for that experience. I think what I liked most was the experience at the hospital: working there, helping the patients, was really satisfying.
We met a lot of people around Mombasa and they were all so kind and joyful. It’s a totally different vibe from the people at home, but I enjoyed it a lot. I really like the colours of Mombasa and the joy of the people. We met very special people everywhere, even travelling to Diani or Watamu, and I will miss them for sure. We made a lot of new friendships.
I enjoyed the whole atmosphere here – I could come home from work and spend the day at the pool or the beach. During the weekends we travelled a lot: we went to Malindi and Watamu and did a quad ride on the sand dunes, we did a safari at Tsavo East, and we went to Diani. You can go snorkelling or hiking – we did nearly all the things that were possible to do here, and we always had a lot of fun.
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