Some more photos from IM China 70.3

Here we are on the beach just before the start of the China half ironman on April 19th, without any clue of the suffering that lay ahead of us for the day! I guess is was better that way.

We are not officially training for anything right now, only trying to 'stay active' as Dave puts it!

It's great to be home!

A picture says a thousand words... it's great to be home and to have received such a warm welcome home.

Time for a haircut!

Catherine did NOT want to get a haircut today, but it has been nearly a year since her last haircut!

Here she is warming up to the idea of the haircut.

She let Mr. Shakur cut her hair again (he gave her her first haircut in the fall of 2007 and the one last summer).

She decided she LIKED her new haircut!

Rainy day activity in Dhaka

Catherine and her twin Henry (they really were born on the same day only hours apart) are busy measuring the ingredients for chocolate cupcakes. They giggled and enjoyed yelling into the bowl for some reason. We said they were going to scare the chocolate away!

Here are the kids (and moms) busy following the cupcake directions. Thank goodness for the duty free shop, where I bought the good 'ole fashioned chocolate cake mix.

(Note the stylish container for my spatulas and such...an old gatorade cannister...CLASSY!)

They were FOCUSED!

Catherine's friend Maddy and her mommy.

(Do you think we have enough soda water on top of our fridge???)

Silly girls

Catherine and Caroline getting something to eat...Caroline is now holding on to spoons, cups and picking up her own food!!!

Can you believe this is the face of a girl that has been sick this week? She bounced back like a champ!

A monkey.

yep, that;s our little monkey-moo.

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ICDDR,B opens a temporary urban treatment centre to cope with ongoing diarrhoeal disease demand

The ongoing rise in diarrhoeal disease in Dhaka since the middle of March resulted in ICDDR,B putting up tents in its car parks and take on over 150 additional staff to cope with the extra patient load. Despite this extra capacity we have had to put up beds in the hospital corridors when we received over 1000 patients. This emergency is more prolonged than that of 2007 and that we have already treated more patients than in 2007.

Despite this ICDDR,B has turned no-one away and has yet to lose a patient from simple dehydration. Sadly, as in 2007, we have had many instances of patients arriving dead despite passing a number of clinical centres on the way.

Given our technical competence and experience to treat large numbers of patients with diarrhoea, at the request of the Honourable Health Minister and Director General of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, ICDDR,B opened up a new treatment centre in Mirpur on the other side of Dhaka, where a lot of new diarrhoeal cases are being identified.

This temporary 50 bed hospital began operations on Thursday April 30 inside a government Unani and Ayurvedic Degree College and Hospital, and is already saving lives within a day of its operation – patients arriving so dehydrated they wouldn’t have survived the journey to the Dhaka Hospital main campus. A number of improvements have been made to the facilities to improve both infrastructure required for high-volume diarrhoeal treatment, and facilities required for staff and patients.

This year, more than ever before, we need your donation to continue this lifesaving treatment. We depend on you to be able to continue saving lives. DONATE NOW.

https://www.givedirect.org/give/givefrm.asp?CID=8719

Heat, drought, and failed infrastructure lead to continuing high numbers of diarrhoeal patients

Beginning in March, large numbers of young children began arriving at the Dhaka Hospital for treatment of diarrhoeal diseases. Testing at the time showed that 4 in 5 of these children were infected with rotavirus – a common winter disease in Bangladesh. As the weeks passed, the high patient numbers continued, but gradually we also began to see large numbers of adults with other, more serious diarrhoeal diseases joining the ongoing rush of rotavirus cases. While we don’t definitively know all the causes of this unusual outbreak, this year, the rain we normally expect in April has not arrived and temperatures have soared in Dhaka, leaving people with little of the clean drinking water they desperately need.

We visited the Taj Mahal!

Catherine, Caroline and I followed Dave to Delhi, where he had to go for work. We enjoyed swimming in the great pool at the Oberoi and ordering room service. But the highlight of our week-end was a visit to the famous Taj Mahal. We had a great guide and I learned a lot about this wonder of the world. Despite the *warm* temps...(47.5 Celsius!) we enjoyed our day-trip (Agra is about a 3-4 hour drive from Delhi) to the Taj Mahal.Here is a family photo in front of the great Taj Mahal.

The white marble is inlaid with semi-precious stones. The marble was carried by horsecart from a town 360km away from Agra. The Taj took 22 years to complete and was finally finished in 1653.

The building is perfectly symmetrical, geometrical and mathematical (according to our guide). Meaning that even in the 17th century, they got the numbers exactly right.