TIA: This is Africa

I have been here for about a month, and I am struggling to start to tell you all of all the things I have seen here. So I will begin with a story.

Since I am a music lover, this can be the background music to this post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzQmdTt5dPQ

One morning while rounding, we were about to leave "incubateur 1," the first of 2 rooms with premature babies, 2 to a room. Each baby is in an incubator. Before you are impressed that the hospital has incubators, let me inform you: they do not work. They serve as a theoretically stable home for the babies. To keep them warm, the mothers take empty 1L soda bottles and fill them with warm water (periodically, but some of the mothers neglect doing so). The mothers are in charge of taking care of the baby: feeding the baby, bathing the baby, changing the baby. So, in essence, the baby is out of the incubator a lot, and is in clothes purchased from the market (not sterile, but cute).

So back to the story: The team is about to leave the room, when a nurse, Annie, tugs at my scrubs. She just started and is quite shy. She didn't say anything but brought me to a baby who was lying on a bed being changed (by the way, the diapers come in one size, extra large, so that on these babies, the diaper comes up to their armpits). She pointed to the babies hand. I didn't have my glasses on, but i saw little dots on the babies hand. Very scared, I thought that it was petechiae, little hemorrhages that can result from severe sepsis (aka bad). I called my attending, and asked him to please look at the baby. He started to laugh, and told me to come take a closer look.

Those little dots in the babies hand? They were not, in fact, petechiae, but little ants crawling in the baby's hand!

TIA.