The Swaziland Wellness Centre was set up in 2007 on the background of many Swazi nurses leaving the country to practice overseas and a desire by the Nurses Association to understand why. A questionnaire showed that many nurses and midwives felt that they had to leave because of a positive HIV diagnosis and an unwillingness to queue alongside their patients to receive treatment. Moving forward with this information, and with the help of the International Council of Nurses, the Wellness Centre was set up. It acts as a primary care centre for nurses and midwives and 5 immediate family members, dealing with acute as well as chronic illnesses medically and holistically, and now has a great deal of financial support from the government.
I visited the Wellness Centre this morning on my way to the airport. Muzi headed up the centre and had been influential in organising my visit!
It was quite overwhelming to receive some gifts:
And nice to be able to exchange something from Flight For Every Mother:
It really had been a cohesive visit and I felt that we had stimulated so much discussion and movement in terms of maternal health.
From there the airport beckoned. It wasn’t too difficult to persuade security that our Swazi friends should see us to the plane:
And from there, still with the same training aircraft in the circuit as when we had arrived, we were off on our 3 hour flight to Maseru in Lesotho:
There were lots of thunderstorms to dodge, as demonstrated by our ‘strike finder’ instrument:
As we flew South-West through the Free-State and towards Lesotho, the mountains became more numerous and classically flat-topped:
Could we squeeze through gap between storms to reach the airport at Maseru?
We just managed!
We were directed not to the 3.2km North to South runway, but to the much shorter East to West runway on account of the wind. It was quite difficult to spot but we got there in the end.
Finding our welcome party was a bit more tricky. We weren’t really sure if anyone would be there waiting – I hadn’t managed to check my emails for 24 hours. We found a van from the Wellness Centre in the busy airport car park but no driver. Was this too much of a coincidence or was it for us? We walked around and asked around and finally found our man, the driver! Accommodation had been tricky for the Lesotho Nurses Association to find on our behalf given that it was the ‘Top of Africa’ Mountain Rally the following weekend, but they had finally managed after many attempts and we arrived at a guesthouse in the town of Maseru for the night. Tired as always and with no supermarket within walking distance I made the short journey to buy some provisions and we had a picnic supper with the internet as company!