AISHA woke up this morning with a realization – only 10 days left. Reaffirming our resolve to make our fieldwork a success, we commenced our work at the WHI office. As usual, the team split up tackling various tasks at once.

Simone and Vrushti proceeded to write and improve the code for our brand new use case – AISHA Quizzes, and the others proceeded to complete our verification of the SRH Database, ensuring its compatibility with Sierra Leonian standards. 

In addition, AISHA had arranged two appointments in the afternoon which meant that we would have to split up once again. Maaz and Natalie had planned to meet with Dean Izeker of the University of Makeni, essentially validating the information we had gathered from Sister Bangura of Ernest Bai Koroma, as well as scouting out the complexities of a private university. On the other hand, the rest of the group had planned to attend a meeting with Sister Adama Michael at the Loreta Clinic. With our fair share of bad luck, the afternoon did not go as planned.

As two of our cars had gone to Freetown, the Impact Fellows in Makeni were down to only one. Owing to this, AISHA encountered various transportation issues, including the amusing incident of fitting 17 people into one Landcruiser. Because of the aforementioned transportation issues, we were delayed for our meeting at Loreta. When we finally left for the clinic, Gaby received a text that Sister Adama had gone home. Disappointing, I know.

As for the adventures of Maaz and Natalie, they were not spectacular. We shared a car with Mothers of Sierra Leone and headed to the same destination – the University of Makeni. Mothers had also planned to meet with Dean Isseker but as our appointment was supposed to be relatively short, we went first. Dean Isseker was a charismatic woman and while it was a pleasure to meet her, it turned out that the University of Makeni had a different school for nursing students – Saint John of God – which was 45 minutes away. Dean Isseker advised us to meet with the director of the nursing school – Brother Michael – for questions related to that department. We thanked her for her help and proceeded to wait outside for the car for the next hour. 

To conclude, the meetings did not go to plan. However, the meeting with Dean Izeker did leave us with plenty of information to digest. We still have to figure out the logistics for meeting with Brother Michael and scheduling another meeting with Sister Adama, but we plan to resolve these issues before the end of the week.

Rating: 2/5