I figured out the reason for the always-being-late-ness of Africans. It’s not that they don’t care if they’re on time…it’s that nobody seems to be in the habit of checking what time it is! Thursday evenings we have Bible study in the church, and everyone’s supposed to go. It starts at 5:30. At 5:45 nobody’s gone, so I ask a couple peple if they’re going. They say yes. I say “what time” they say “5:30” I say “well, it’s 5:45” They say “WHAT!?” and rush to get ready. I do the same thing with the people next door, same reaction. It’s so funny to me, who compulsively likes to know what time it is. The same thing happened on Sunday morning with church. When I was about done getting ready to be there on time at 9, people were still sitting out washing their clothes and telling me they had “some minutes left” before church started. NOT! I went at 9:05 and only 1 other person was there, so I came back until 9:30 and went again when my roommates went, and then there were a few more people there. The last of the people didn’t show up until around 10:30/11 though. :-D
Friday afternoon someone caught a huge mudfish in the river, so pieces were given out to people for dinner. Somehow my house got the face. Not the head. The face. Guess how much meat is on the face of a mudfish? Not much. So after trekking to the storeroom in the dark to get oil to deep-fry the fish, people finally actually looked at what we had and realized there was not much meat to be cut off the fish. The sufuria it was in kept moving from apartment to apartment as different people looked at it and poked it with a knife, the whole time I’m trying out my new phrase: “sitaki kula uso wa samaki”- “I don’t want to eat the face of a fish” and people are laughing at me. Eventually we decided there wasn’t enough meat on the face to cook, and I cooked some scrambled eggs to go with the ugali they’d already made, and someone else made soup with the fish. I tasted a bite of the meat they managed to find somewhere, and it was surprisingly good and surprisingly didn’t taste anything like fish. Hence why it was surprisingly good.
Saturday was Garissa day! So I was told the trailer would load up at 6 and leave at 6:30, so I planned to be up around 5:30 so I could get my mattress out of there since I’m sleeping in the trailer, of course. The night before they tested out the tractor pulling the trailer and left it right outside my door, which was very nice of them to bring my bedroom so close to me! :-P A half hour after I woke up, I heard my roommates finally waking up and knocked on the door so they could let me in so I could shower and eat breakfast. Unfortunately, the bowl I tried to eat cereal out of had a hole in it so I poured milk all over the table. Cleaning it up cut into my getting ready time so I just brought the box of corn flakes on the trailer with me, to the endless amusement of the Kenyans. So surprisingly close to the target time, we pulled out in the trailer and stopped at a few of the local villages to pick up people who also wanted to go into town. We ended up with about 35 people and 2 goats on the trailer going into town. The path was the same bumpy trail-through-the-bush we drove in on, so we had to repeatedly duck or crouch down to avoid getting smacked in the face and arms and back by branches or thorns or thorny branches. They’re called “mathenge” though I’m not sure if “mathenge” is the word for “thorn” or it’s a specific type of thorn…I’ve heard a couple things that led me to opposite conclusions, so I dont know. but just about EVERY tree or bush-like thing seems to have more thorns than a cactus here. Anyway. Of course the mathenge could be avoided by sitting down in the middle instead of standing and leaning against the railing but where is the fun in that? Of course I stood against the railing and ducked whenever the thorns were coming. Before I mastered the art of “compulsory worship” as they sometimes call it, I got a nice scratch across my forehead and a good tear in the back of my shirt. Battle scars, woohoo! The people in the middle-front never had to duck, and they were the ones who would yell “sleep!” and “wake up!” when we needed to get down and when it was safe to stand up….most of the time.
About 10 minutes into the ride something made a noise and something fell off the wheel. We stopped the tractor and someone ran back to get whatever it was, then everyone piled out of the trailer so they could lift it up and re-attach the something to the wheel. Then we all piled back in and continued. When we got to the giant dried-up riverbed, the sand was pretty soft and deep, like a beach, and the tractor got stuck. Not to worry, this happens literally every time, so everyone got out and pushed it across the riverbed, then piled back in. I got some pretty good pictures/video of the process that may eventually make it to the internet.
So that was an adventure! We got into Garissa and people went their separate ways running errands, I got some apple juice at the grocery store, which I had been craaaaaving for some reason, and we had COLD, FRESH passion fruit juice when we stopped for breakfast…it was a little piece of heaven. It’s not often you eat cold or fresh things in Sombo, and I love passion fruit juice!
It’s still really amusing to me to see the funny looks I get from eeeeeeveryone on the street. In Nairobi, it was just the kids who openly gawked or said anything, but in these more remote places, even the adults and especially the high-on-something people often stop in their tracks or try yelling to me in Somali, which I know a total of 3 words in.
So we did our stuff, and everyone got back to the trailer around 4, not bad for planning to leave around 3:30. We got back after only one breakdown in the riverbed, around 6:00, which is apparently the earliest they’ve arrived back in over a year. Last time it was 1am because the tractor broke in the middle of nowhere and they had to find a way to fix it in the bush. Some people went to sleep and woke up to the sound of hyenas before they fixed it. Ooooooooh bush life! It’s an adventure every day!
Soooooo I was so dirty from sitting on the ground on the ride back (I’d had enough thorn adventures for the day) and getting shrapnel from all the branches we drove by and stripped the leaves/thorns/bark off of, that I took a hot-wateer-thanks-to-the-sun bath and then I swept out my bedroom because it was dirty and goats don’t care where they are when they poop, they just do.
Sunday morning it RAINED for like 5 minutes, and lightly, but still, it RAINED, during church. That was exciting. :-P Also we made chapatti with dinner! And I had my first ever unsuccessful attempts and first ever successful attempt at siphoning…there’s small-ish tanks of water outside every couple of rooms, and our inside tank was empty. I feel like siphoning is a good life skill to have. :-P So it was a good day.
Also, there was a youth meeting (youth being…unmarried people?) and we all went around to introduce ourselves and “say something” and I had nothing to say, so I said “peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” etc and that was quite amusing to everyone. Everything I do or say is hysterical to them, so I just keep doing things that even I think are ridiculous because it’s so funny that they think I’m so funny.
Today a 35-ish year old guy came into the clinic because he had a stick stuck in his leg. It had gotten lodged in there not long ago, maybe yesterday? But it had moved since he’d been walking on it. So Margaret numbed the area and tried digging it out with a needle but it was too deep and we couldn’t figure out exactly where it had gone to, so we told him to come back in a few days…hopefully his body will do some of the work for us first.
Today I was going to make myself Italian-style green beans for lunch…and probably nothing else, since that’s about as complicated as I feel like getting out here, and I managed to find a grater to shred my garlic, and I’d bought olive oil in Nairobi, and as soon as I get the oil heating up, the stove ran out of gas. So there’s a sufuria full of oil and garlic, and a can of whole green beans, just sitting there, uncooked and uneaten, though I can just TASTE them the way my mom makes them….but theres nothing I can do about it right now. Hopefully someone else will lend us their stove to cook dinner. We usually do that in groups anyways so I’m not worried. But I was contemplating those beans all morning and really looking forward to them. :-P
Monday, February 28, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
In which I kill some bats, and really want some apple juice
We always knew I was going to come to Sombo for 2 or 3 weeks, but we didn’t know when, and the time we scheduled it for changed twice before settling on the time I’m here now. I was wondering why that might be, and joking that something really rare and interesting was going to come into the clinic and God wanted me here during that time so I could see it. I think the real reason he wanted me here when I ended up here was to be here when the YWAM team was here. Not so I could enjoy the company of Americans, because I’d have been just fine among only Kenyans, but because I think I learned a lot from them being here. They spent 3 months together in Iceland before Kenya doing discipleship training, and so when they were here they were used to, and continued, doing daily team devotionals and prayer, and they used a lot of their free time to just have quiet time with God by the river, and so many of their conversations with each other were about what God was teaching them. It inspired me to be doing more of the same. Though I havn’t decreased the amount of time I was spending with God I felt like I needed to be doing it more, especially since I’m here and I have so much time to do that sort of thing. At Cornell the constant conflict was between finding time for God and people and schoolwork. Here, there’s no conflikct for me, there’s just a lot of time. So I should really be using it for God while I have it.
Some interesting medical things have happened in the clinic:
More interesting noises coming from people’s lungs…sometimes you don’t even need a stethoscope to hear it but it’s always exciting when I can clearly recognize a sound with one.
There was a 12-ish year old boy who had gotten cut with a panga (machete-ish big knife) and it was pretty deep and it would have needed stitches if it hadn’t been too long since the cut. To try and help, someone had put the contents of some medication capsules on the cut. They had no idea what the medication was, but they figured it would help. Luckily for them, all the meds we give out in capsules happen to be antibiotics, so it probably did help a little. He needs a tetanus shot, but we don’t have a refrigerator so we don’t have tetanus. We sent him to the government clinic but they’re out of stock, so he’s got to keep waiting. Oh yeah, and the cut was right above the knee, and the whole knee area is about the size of a baseball on this SKINNG little kid.
There was a woman who needed an antibiotic shot in the gluteus and when she lifted up her dress to expose the area we saw all these scars on her lower back region, and Margaret asked her what they were from, she said it was a treatment for paralysis, I guess she was paralyzed for a while when she was younger…apparently it worked, because she was walking just fine now. :P
And non-medical things in the clinic:
There’s a scale, a typical bathroom scale, for weighting the kids to see what dosage of a few differet medications they need, which are by weight. They are always so confused by it. They’re told to stand on it, so at first they often just rest one foot on it, then Margaret tries to get them to put both feet on it, but they’re still half sitting on their mom’s lap, so the picks them up and puts them on but they’re holding onto the table for balance…it’s so funny to watch them. Even a 14 year old girl, I had to get on the scale to show her what to do the other day. It’s so interesting.
Often, people don’t know how old they are, or how old their kids are. A woman who looked about 40 said she was 20, we were like ummm no. People with kids who are barely talking and came in being carried by the mom say the kid is 4 years old and we say uuuuum no. So oftentimes it’s just a guess. Or, they know what year the kid was born but don’t have the simple math skills to accurately count how many years it’s been since then.
Also, the setup is that there’s one chair outside the room, and inside there’s 2 big chairs and one tiny kids’ chair for the patients, besides the ones Margaret and I sit on. As soon as I stand up to go get something out of the cabinet,(or even if I stand up and pivot 90 degrees so I can put pills in a bag) whoever’s outside comes in an sits in my chair, almost without fail. Inevitably, the 2nd or 3rd patient will bring the outside chair inside, and most of the time 3 or 4 people will be crowding the door or standing just sinside the door. I don’t know why on earth they ALL feel the need to be in the room at the same time, if they just want to watch or hear each other’s business or just have a little Somali-party in the consultation room, but it never takes long for it to fill up, and I have to be really fast to get my chair back. Often I end up sitting on the exam table because it takes too long for my chair to open back up. And someone often joins me on the Exam table.
OH did I mention each of the chairs is occupied by an adult, and they usually have at least 2 children with them, who are often crying because they just got or are about to get an injection?
Sometimes it’s a zoo, but it makes me laugh a lot. J
Today we had the best non-medical adventure yet. Every morning there’s droppings that look just like mouse droppings n the floor, and there’s a big stack of boxes in the corner from which emanates squeaking all morning. So I assumed there were mice living among the boxes. Turns out they’re bats, and today we decided to move the boxes and get them out…so we started removing them one by one and the bats sounded like they were getting disturbed. So we look against the wall and we can see them crawling around back there. So we needed to kill them to get them out otherwise they’d just come back tonight…so we started smashing the boxes against the wall to squish them. It worked a little but then they went to the bottom and we couln’t get any more. So we started moving boxes, and then there were some that were too heavy, so we left them for a bit and discovered more bats behing the metal cabinet. There are boxes on top of the cabinet so we took this stick and used it to scare the bats into walking up the wall and then squished them with the boxes. We got 3 of them that way and a couple escaped. Then Pator David came in, and we had him help us move the really heavy boxes but that’s where ALL the bts were hiding. So we start moving boxes and as the bats started come out a LOT and pastor David and Margaret were beating them with the stick and a broom, they were climbing up the wall and getting whacked back down, or falling down after getting whacked in the head, or they would jump and try to run or fly away but all they managed to do was flap their wings on the floor before they got a blow to the head. It was really funny, we were all kind of jumpy and they kept jumping out at us so we were more fighting-them-off beating them than attacking-them beating them…all the while laughing hysterically at the ridiculousness of it all. So when all was said and done there were somewhere around 40 bats dead in a huge pile of their own droppings that was more voluminous than the bats themselves. So I went through the pile and made sure they were all dead and not just knocked out, or not just suffering (at least that’s what I told myself- I was putting them out of their misery)by squishing their heads with the stick. Then we swept the whole droppings/corpses pile into a box and did the only thing you can do with things you don’t want in Sombo, and burned it.
It was basically the most fun I’ve had since I got here. :-P
I found out last night that that the trailer I’ve been sleeping in is actually what we’re going to use on Saturday to go to Garissa. Everyone piles in the back and the tractor pulls it the hour trip through the unpaved backroads until we get to the paved roads where there might police, and then we take a matatu into Garissa. I’m really excited for thist rip because 1. I think it will be fun to ride the trailer. 2. I can’t wait to go to Garissa and not be miserable from the beginning of malaria, and 3. I’ve developed a CRAVING like nothing else for apple juice, so the FIRST thing I’m gonna do is get some. I was joking that since we leave so early, I will just continue sleeping while everyone piles in the trailer with me and I’ll wake up when we get to Garissa. :D
My battery is going to die on the laptop soon so I’m going to try and post this now.
Also, I hate hate hate hate having a dream where I give Daddy a hug and then wake up to realize I can’t give him one the way having a dream like that always makes me want to.
Monday, February 21, 2011
In which I get malaria, but don't die
Some more about Sombo for you:
There’s basically 14 villages around here representing 7 different tribes, the closest to us are Watta and Somali. I’ve been told you can tell the difference (in the men at least) by the texture of their hair- since the Somalis have done a lot of marrying among Arabs, I guess, they usually have straighter, different textured hair. I haven’t figured out the women yet though because they all have their heads covered. Sometimes you can see a little bit peeking out though.
As I said before, the school is made up of entirely Muslim students but I forgot to point out this: the great thing about them going to a Christian school and learning about Jesus, is that despite the fact that the current village elders are VERY anti-Christian, these kids are going to grow up quite used to it. In a couple decades, when they are the village elders, there’s a good chance it will be much easier for someone to accept Christ without the fear of being killed by their elders.
Margaret told me that there’s a government clinic not far away, but people prefer to come to hers because they say the drugs she gives them make them better, when the govt. hospital’s don’t. That’s the work of God if I’ve ever seen it! J
As you may have seen on facebook, I told God that I would quite appreciate it if the internet would work in my room instead of just on the edge of the property, and I tried it and it worked!! It’s kind of in-and-out, but it was pretty cool and I was quite appreciative. :-P
Sleeping in the truck is the best thing ever. We can lock ourselves in there by putting the back up, and it’s quite safe. Every night at almost exactly 10:03 the wind starts blowing and it gets soo nice. On a guys-in-the-truck night, I tried to sleep outside on 2 plastic chairs put together with a rolled up mattress inside to bridge the hole between them but one of the Kenyans told me it was too dangerous because animals would come eat me. So I appeased her by sleeping in my room with the door open. I don’t know why she thought that was safer, they could easily walk in, but ok. We took the plastic off the back window so we finally have a cross-breeze.
I got to see the crocodile in the river, but APPARENTLY some people got to see one jump out and eat a goat! In like 3 bites. I was so jealous! And then other people saw monkeys fighting by the river. I don’t know why I keep missing the good stuff. All I got to see was a kid pee all over himself and throw up when we tried to hold him down to give him an injection he really didn’t want. :-P
The clinic has been steadily FULL all morning long, and then we get like 3 patients in the afternoon, so we go home for lunch and just stay there until we see them come. There’s a LOT of coughing and malaria. Almost everyone who comes in gets an anti-malarial, a fever reducer, and an antibiotic. I’ve heard some interesting noises in people’s lungs and gotten to give a few intravenous injections. We don’t have a tourniquet so I usually leave the kids, who need to be held down usually, to Margaret and I’ll do the adults. Everyone’s got really prominent veins here so it’s not too bad with adults. There was a baby who was dehydrated so you could see her fontanel sunken in and a girl with clogged ears we pulled wax from in chunks.
Saturday we went into Garissa to go shopping. We only had room for a few people in the car so it ended up being only the girls that went, the guys all didn’t want to go as badly as the girls did so they let us go, and gave the girls money to buy them kikois (?) these Somali man-skirt things a lot of the men wear around here. They’re also much cooler than pants or shorts. So we all got khangas or dresses, which I need to ask one of the Watta people around here to teach me how to wrap like they do, then had lunch, and went to a grocery store for snack foods. The road there and back was ridiculously bumpy, and I was sitting in the trunk with a few Kenyans we were dropping off, and it was kind of painful. :-P The ride back was basically the most miserable time of my life because somehow over the course of the day I’d gotten really achy, a headache, a fever, and a very unhappy gastrointestinal system. I spent the whole ride singing my dad’s old bedtime songs to myself and asking God to please make my head NOT explode every time there was a bump (when was there not a bump?)…I’m still trying to make all that stuff go away, and despite repeated begging God to make every single muscle in my body not be sore and please allow my large intestine to remember its job and reabsorb the water from my diet.
I took cipro and that didn’t help, so I knew it wasn’t bacterial…I thought it sounded more like malaria than anything else but I didn’t think I could have malaria because I must have gotten it 10-14 days ago (that’s the incubation period) and I was in Nairobi then, and they say Nairobi isn’t a malaria area.
OOoooooooooooh but it is.
I am at this point certain it is malaria, because I took malaria treatment and got a lot better really quickly. Plus 2 other people with the same symptoms as me had positive malaria blood tests. One of those people may or may not have been Heidi and I may or may not think it’s kind of cool that we got it in separate countries at the same time. :-P
So I am feeling much, much, much, much, much…etc. better now, so thank you for all of your prayers, I appreciate it a lot!
Since I am doing better today, I did some laundry this afternoon, and was surprised to find my clothes completely dry 15 minutes later when I went to put the 2nd batch on the line. How’s that for a drying machine? I guess it helps that the humidity here is about -25 and the temperature is about 100. :-D
This whole thing may or may not make any sense/bore you to death, probably because I wrote most of it in a malaria-induced…I don’t know. So bear with me, it’ll get better. :-P
I’m hopefully going to post some pictures on facebook now, so look out! J
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
In which I brave the desert and get an arm workout for my internet
So! Here I am in Sombo!
But first things first:
Monday, I spent the morning repacking my suitcase with different things to take to Sombo, then we went out to the medical supplies container and spent a few hours sorting through boxes of gauze, gloves, bandages, IV tubing, syringes, and my absolute favorite, suture material. I got to sort through that box and organize them by material. Apparently cotton and polyester are not just for sewing your clothing! I’ve been the nylon and the cat gut and the prolene before, but I’d never seen polyester or cotton suture material. There was even one set of surgical steel suture material, which I was excited to find because I have a stash of it myself, making circles around my sternum!
Anyway. Then went to the Nakumaat to buy 3 weeks worth of groceries for me to eat while I’m here, then we went to Anna’s basketball game and left early cuz it was raining, to have dinner at an outdoor café in the pouring rain. There were porch-y ceilings so we were mostly dry but the tile floor was soaked and it was freezing (for Nairobi…not like most of you people are dealing with now!)
Tuesday morning bright and early we left to go to Sombo, we took 2 cars because there were 8 of us going, and the car I was in decided to make strange rumbling noises every now and then. So 2 hours in, we pulled over to see what was wrong, couldn’t figure it out, kept going, and made is most of the way there before it became a problem again. They thought they figured it out so we stopped to ty to fix it, but it wasn’t that, so it didn’t get fixed until we got to Sombo, sent some people back to the nearest town (an hour away) to get oil, then came back.
The drive took about 6 hours and the first half was absolutely gorgeous, with mountains and crazy rock formations, and the second half was not gorgeous but it was interesting, as there were lots of villages, with people herding cows, goats, and camels all over the place. I saw more camels in 30 seconds then I had in the entire rest of my life combined. If I can ever get the internet good enough, I’ll try and post some pictures.
The road was pretty good until we turned off the main highway to Garissa (said nearest town) and then it got really pothole-y, so much so that there were dirt roads on either side that people drove on instead of the road. When we turned off that one, the “main road” to Sombo looked more like an ATV track through the desert, and off we went, bouncing around until we got to Sombo!
So we’re on a 35-acre compound. There’s the church, which is attended only by the mission staff, because EVERYONE else here is Muslim, a couple motel-style apartment buildings, the 4-stall (2 holes in the ground, 2 no-holes for taking a bucket shower) bathrooms, the pastor’s house (has a solar panel for electric) the school building (attended almost entirely by Muslim kids (they learn about Jesus in school, and they come because their parents want them to have an education, and this is the only school in forever distance. Tee hee.), the clinic, which has no pharmacist or lab technician (I’ve been the pharmacist lately) the church (which is literally built on the Bible…the team that built it laid Bibles in the 4 corner posts of concrete when laying the foundation), and a good-sized farm area. There’s a river nearby that has its water pumped to the house (then filtered!) and a couple giant tanks, and one of the tanks has a system of trenches dug from a central aqueduct so they can irrigate the farm. They’re currently growing peanuts and watermelons and probably other things but that’s all I’ve been told. They’re still building the adqeduct/irrigation system so there’s a lot of land that is yet to be farmable. There’s a team from YWAM (youth with a mission) that is mostly Americans here, that are working on that. (I was very pleasantly surprised to know there were so many other people here, and they’ll be here for a little bit, and they’ve been quite nice in welcoming me into their little group and since they were here a few days before me, showing me the best shady spot , which we sat under this afternoon and ate sugar cane they cut from 5 feet away from where we sat, by the river. )
So I am living in a one-room…room with 2 other women, one is the principal of the school and the other is a teacher, they’re 25 and 23 and named (5 things each but their most commonly used names are) Mapesa and Susan. The YWAM team has their people in 2 rooms on mattresses on the floor, but one room stands unoccupied every night as the boys and girls rotate who gets to sleep in the back of this giant truck parked in the…courtyard-ish place, because it’s cooler there. So I’ll probably be joining the girls in there tonight, the breeeeeze is beautiful and it doesn’t reach well inside because there’s plastic over one of the windows. Noooot really sure why it’s there, not everyone has it and it’d be much nicer without it. The YWAM team is here for about another week/week-and-a-half, so I might sleep in the truck every night once they leave, if I like it. :p
It’s about 100+ degrees during the day, and it cools down to maybe 70 at night, when it gets really windy, apparently from the Indian Ocean. The stars are gorgeous and the moon is really, really bright.
you can sit or even sleep outside all night long if you want, it’s nice and warm, and the whole compound is surrounded by a barbed wire fence plus a couple watchmen with guns, so we basically have freedom to roam wherever. The biggest danger is either the crocodiles in the river (I’ve not seen one yet but apparently there was a huge one, and a hippo, the other day) and the thorns that are all over the ground. They collect in your shoes and if you walk in the less well-trod areas you can get 15 in each shoe in 5 minutes, so I got myself a thicker pair of flip-flops for all of $1.
For food, I’m half-cooking for myself, half-eating with the team from the US at the pastor’s house…for laundry, I’ll finally be allowed to do it myself, out of a bucket. For electricity, people bring whatever they need charged to the pastor’s house where he has a power strip that’s constantly full. For internet, you walk 5 minutes to the highest elevation point of the compound and there’s a few cinderblocks set up as a chair and desk. It wasn’t working for me there so I went and stood on a couple blocks and held the computer in the air and that got it to work pretty well, as long as I lifted it up a little higher whenever I needed to click on something.
I haven’t gotten sunburn yet even despite being outside for a good amount of time yesterday, so I guess my gradual tanning attempts were successful, though my skin is peeling from those. :-D
This morning was actually really cool, it was cloudy until about 1, when all of a sudden the clouds disappeared and it got hot as anything again.
There are a lot of ants (little, regular black ones, nothing exciting or painful or deadly) in the room and I tried to eradicate them by sweeping and squishing them and pouring water all over where the opening to their hole was outside, but they just came out EN MASSE! Of another hole, carrying all their babies, and went somewhere else like 6 inches away. So…they’re still there, and they probably hate me now. :-p
This morning as I was waiting to get into one of the showers, I saw this 3-inch long insect waddle over to one of them and start to walk under the door, so I tapped on the door and told the person inside that a huge bug just crawled in, so he saw it and flung it out and said thanks. So then it tried climbing up the wall to the bathroom and I hit it back onto the ground with my shoe, and out of nowhere .003 seconds later this roster comes and just ate it in like 2 pecks, and I laughed.
Soooo, that’s Sombo! Hopefully my crazy antics will allow this post to be posted and the notification emails sent!
But first things first:
Monday, I spent the morning repacking my suitcase with different things to take to Sombo, then we went out to the medical supplies container and spent a few hours sorting through boxes of gauze, gloves, bandages, IV tubing, syringes, and my absolute favorite, suture material. I got to sort through that box and organize them by material. Apparently cotton and polyester are not just for sewing your clothing! I’ve been the nylon and the cat gut and the prolene before, but I’d never seen polyester or cotton suture material. There was even one set of surgical steel suture material, which I was excited to find because I have a stash of it myself, making circles around my sternum!
Anyway. Then went to the Nakumaat to buy 3 weeks worth of groceries for me to eat while I’m here, then we went to Anna’s basketball game and left early cuz it was raining, to have dinner at an outdoor café in the pouring rain. There were porch-y ceilings so we were mostly dry but the tile floor was soaked and it was freezing (for Nairobi…not like most of you people are dealing with now!)
Tuesday morning bright and early we left to go to Sombo, we took 2 cars because there were 8 of us going, and the car I was in decided to make strange rumbling noises every now and then. So 2 hours in, we pulled over to see what was wrong, couldn’t figure it out, kept going, and made is most of the way there before it became a problem again. They thought they figured it out so we stopped to ty to fix it, but it wasn’t that, so it didn’t get fixed until we got to Sombo, sent some people back to the nearest town (an hour away) to get oil, then came back.
The drive took about 6 hours and the first half was absolutely gorgeous, with mountains and crazy rock formations, and the second half was not gorgeous but it was interesting, as there were lots of villages, with people herding cows, goats, and camels all over the place. I saw more camels in 30 seconds then I had in the entire rest of my life combined. If I can ever get the internet good enough, I’ll try and post some pictures.
The road was pretty good until we turned off the main highway to Garissa (said nearest town) and then it got really pothole-y, so much so that there were dirt roads on either side that people drove on instead of the road. When we turned off that one, the “main road” to Sombo looked more like an ATV track through the desert, and off we went, bouncing around until we got to Sombo!
So we’re on a 35-acre compound. There’s the church, which is attended only by the mission staff, because EVERYONE else here is Muslim, a couple motel-style apartment buildings, the 4-stall (2 holes in the ground, 2 no-holes for taking a bucket shower) bathrooms, the pastor’s house (has a solar panel for electric) the school building (attended almost entirely by Muslim kids (they learn about Jesus in school, and they come because their parents want them to have an education, and this is the only school in forever distance. Tee hee.), the clinic, which has no pharmacist or lab technician (I’ve been the pharmacist lately) the church (which is literally built on the Bible…the team that built it laid Bibles in the 4 corner posts of concrete when laying the foundation), and a good-sized farm area. There’s a river nearby that has its water pumped to the house (then filtered!) and a couple giant tanks, and one of the tanks has a system of trenches dug from a central aqueduct so they can irrigate the farm. They’re currently growing peanuts and watermelons and probably other things but that’s all I’ve been told. They’re still building the adqeduct/irrigation system so there’s a lot of land that is yet to be farmable. There’s a team from YWAM (youth with a mission) that is mostly Americans here, that are working on that. (I was very pleasantly surprised to know there were so many other people here, and they’ll be here for a little bit, and they’ve been quite nice in welcoming me into their little group and since they were here a few days before me, showing me the best shady spot , which we sat under this afternoon and ate sugar cane they cut from 5 feet away from where we sat, by the river. )
So I am living in a one-room…room with 2 other women, one is the principal of the school and the other is a teacher, they’re 25 and 23 and named (5 things each but their most commonly used names are) Mapesa and Susan. The YWAM team has their people in 2 rooms on mattresses on the floor, but one room stands unoccupied every night as the boys and girls rotate who gets to sleep in the back of this giant truck parked in the…courtyard-ish place, because it’s cooler there. So I’ll probably be joining the girls in there tonight, the breeeeeze is beautiful and it doesn’t reach well inside because there’s plastic over one of the windows. Noooot really sure why it’s there, not everyone has it and it’d be much nicer without it. The YWAM team is here for about another week/week-and-a-half, so I might sleep in the truck every night once they leave, if I like it. :p
It’s about 100+ degrees during the day, and it cools down to maybe 70 at night, when it gets really windy, apparently from the Indian Ocean. The stars are gorgeous and the moon is really, really bright.
you can sit or even sleep outside all night long if you want, it’s nice and warm, and the whole compound is surrounded by a barbed wire fence plus a couple watchmen with guns, so we basically have freedom to roam wherever. The biggest danger is either the crocodiles in the river (I’ve not seen one yet but apparently there was a huge one, and a hippo, the other day) and the thorns that are all over the ground. They collect in your shoes and if you walk in the less well-trod areas you can get 15 in each shoe in 5 minutes, so I got myself a thicker pair of flip-flops for all of $1.
For food, I’m half-cooking for myself, half-eating with the team from the US at the pastor’s house…for laundry, I’ll finally be allowed to do it myself, out of a bucket. For electricity, people bring whatever they need charged to the pastor’s house where he has a power strip that’s constantly full. For internet, you walk 5 minutes to the highest elevation point of the compound and there’s a few cinderblocks set up as a chair and desk. It wasn’t working for me there so I went and stood on a couple blocks and held the computer in the air and that got it to work pretty well, as long as I lifted it up a little higher whenever I needed to click on something.
I haven’t gotten sunburn yet even despite being outside for a good amount of time yesterday, so I guess my gradual tanning attempts were successful, though my skin is peeling from those. :-D
This morning was actually really cool, it was cloudy until about 1, when all of a sudden the clouds disappeared and it got hot as anything again.
There are a lot of ants (little, regular black ones, nothing exciting or painful or deadly) in the room and I tried to eradicate them by sweeping and squishing them and pouring water all over where the opening to their hole was outside, but they just came out EN MASSE! Of another hole, carrying all their babies, and went somewhere else like 6 inches away. So…they’re still there, and they probably hate me now. :-p
This morning as I was waiting to get into one of the showers, I saw this 3-inch long insect waddle over to one of them and start to walk under the door, so I tapped on the door and told the person inside that a huge bug just crawled in, so he saw it and flung it out and said thanks. So then it tried climbing up the wall to the bathroom and I hit it back onto the ground with my shoe, and out of nowhere .003 seconds later this roster comes and just ate it in like 2 pecks, and I laughed.
Soooo, that’s Sombo! Hopefully my crazy antics will allow this post to be posted and the notification emails sent!
Sunday, February 13, 2011
In which I eat my dinner while it looks at me, and surprise everyone including myself by leaving Mathare a week early
Blog Post 11
Yesterday I found about a minor change of plans for me- due to scheduling stuff, I was originally planning on leaving Mathare and going to Sombo on Friday ,but now we’re leaving Tuesday. I was supposed to come to the Bass’ house for dinner tonight anyways, so I’m just staying here tomorrow and we’ll leave Tues. morning. So this only became apparent yesterday, so I went from having 5 days left to having ½ day left and had to scramble to get everything together (not difficult when it’s all sitting in one half of an armoire) and say bye to everyone I thought I’d have an extra few days with (actually harder than I’d originally anticipated…I didn’t realize how many people I wanted to say good bye to)
So I’ve made lots and lots of promises that I’ll come back and visit to make up for my sudden disappearance, and hopefully hopefully hopefully I’ll be able to do just that. I was shocked at how people were reacting to my leaving too soon…like they were seriously going to miss me, even after such a short time. These Kenyans, I tell you, they are welcoming and friendly beyond belief and just pick you up and bring you into their homes and their hearts quite rapidly. So I’m no longer worried about feeling disconnected from people because I’m moving so much. J
Yesterday I went to visit the actual school/”CDC” (child development center) part of MCDC. We took a matatu again (woohoo!) and walked a little bit to the school campus. There are about 500 students who attend there, and about 30 they said, who board there. So I got to meet some of them, tour the dorms and the classrooms and the still-in-progress building. The interesting thing about building here is that basically, all the buildings are made so that at any time should you want to, you can just add another floor on top, and that’s what they often do, as the money becomes available.
Interesting clinical of the week:
A 3 year old girl with really bad oral thrush (yeast infection on the tongue)- she got meds and was back a few days later with her mom, who had a cough or something, and it was almost entirely gone, so that was good.
We took out the stitches from one of the kids we sutured last week, and he had these huge (not really, but compared to how big they should be) holes from the giant needle. There has been zero usage of scissors in the whole suturing/removal process…we have a box of 100 scalpel blades and so we just slash the nylon threads with them. I don’t really like it, I feel like I’m gonna poke someone’s eye out, but you gotta do what you gotta do!
Some people came by the other day to visit who run a franchise of clinics called Child and Family Wellness Clinics (CFW Clinics) they have about 80 nurse-run clinics, where they charge as low as they can while still making enough money for the nurses to make a living. So people get low-cost care and nurses get jobs (they can prescribe here) and there’s a central headquarters that is in charge of procuring the lowest-cost-possible drugs for distribution to the clinics. They seem to be very successful, they’ve been around for 10 years they said.
The other day I went to buy an avocado from the fruit stand right outside our building…I have basically zero ability to determine if an avocado is ripe, because my mom never buys them and doesn’t allow them in the house (seriously…) so I just took the one he gave me and when I got inside and cut it open it was not quite ripe and had a couple rather large grey spots. So now I’ve decided that they’re ripe when they’re soft (right? Cuz this one was a little harder than ripe ones I’ve eaten. :-p) and I’m going to pick out my own fruit from now on!
A social observation:
In Kenya, when you go to someone’s house, they offer you food, drink, etc. And it’s rude if you do not accept it, you’re considered prideful, like the stuff they’re offering isn’t good enough for you. So even if you don’t want it, aren’t hungry or just ate or are about to go somewhere to eat, etc. you have to take it or you’re prideful. I think that’s interesting, because really, it’s the host who’s being prideful by being offended when you don’t accept what they offer. It makes much more sense to me (of course, since that’s the way I was raised) for you to offer someone food, drink, whatever, and give them the choice of whether they want it or not. That way you’ve fulfilled your obligation to offer, and they can be comfortable and choose to accept or not without worrying about offending their host. This paragraph comes from me hating being forced to drink an entire coke and eat a muffin right before I’m going home to eat a gigantic dinner I can barely finish on an empty stomach. :-P At home I’d just say “I can’t spoil my dinner” and be done with it.
New culinary experience: “small fish” basically 2-inch long whole, dried-out fish that tasted…just like the smell of fish, plus a lot of salt. The texture was like eating…fish scales. It didn’t gross me out like liver but it wasn’t really pleasant either. Oh, and they watched me while I ate them. They were whole, after all. ;-)
I tried to chop cabbage the way the Kenyans do it and failed miserably, the pieces were coming off huge. So I gave up after like 10 seconds, haha. I guess I should try a little more perseverance, but I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s dinner. :-p
I went to a friend’s house for dinner and as the “guest of honor” got to eat the “best part” of the turkey(?): The liver. Great. Thankfully, Turkey liver is apparently sliiiightly less crumbly than cow liver and this one was slightly less cooked than last time, so I managed to not gag, so long as I shoved a spoonful of rice in my mouth as soon as I swallowed to get rid of the taste, and one right before I swallowed, to help the not-quite-fully-chewed pieces slide down better.
Sooooo here I am, at the Bass’ house, the electricity has gone out 3 or 4 times already tonight cuz it’s raining…there’s nothing like the sound of rain on a the tin roof of the patio with the breeze blowing tiny sprays of rain in…the only thing to ruin it is the generator going in the background…because we had to finish cooking dinner, cuz there’s people coming over. :-p
Tomorrow we’ll do more unpacking of the 40-ft container full of medical stuff, and then Tuesday it’s off to Sombo! I don’t know how good the internet or electricity will be out there, but I’ll update as much as that allows me!
Monday, February 7, 2011
In which I participate in a dowry-negotiation party (not mine!) and wonder if that thing coming out of a nose is snot, brain, or a worm (it was snot)
I’ll get the gross part over with first-ish:
Warning: This paragraph starts out not gross, gets slightly gross, and then pretty gross. pretty gross is at the end, and then there's a "it's safe to read now" warning when it's over. Behave according to your preference, but don't blame me if you get grossed out, because I WARNED YOU! :-D
So these past few day’s medical interesting-nesses:
Not gross at all: A woman 38 weeks pregnant came in the day the doctor wasn’t there, just me and the pharmacist and the lab tech, to get her BP checked…it was 152/75. So I think…pre-eclampsia. Except I don’t know what the exact numbers are to count as pre-eclampsia or what you do to treat it, and there’s no doctor. So I go get the pharmacist while I look up in a book what they recommend. Complete bed rest and monitoring of BP, for her level of BP. So I ask the pharmacist, and she’s been talking to the parents-to-be and apparently they’ve been going to a different clinic during the pregnancy, so she sent them back there. So I’m praying “God please let there be a doctor there who actually knows what they’re doing because I don’t have a cluuuuuuue!” And today I was telling the Dr. about it and he goes “that’s an immediate referral to a hospital for delivery. Especially since she was so far along” Great. So I hope she got induced and soon, because there’s a lot of bad things that could happen with high BP, and really very low chance of anything going wrong when you deliver only 2 weeks early. Now I know.
(Hence why I find it absurd that the pharmacist kept trying to get me to see patients when the Dr. wasn’t there. I don’t have a license to practice medicine, I’m not going to start presecribing meds! I don’t even know what meds to prescribe! )
Anyway.
Slightly gross: kid came in with his thumb nail mostly detached. Lucky for him, the nail bed was intact, so I cleaned it and wrapped it and told him to leave it. Comes bac the next day with no bandage and it’s dirty, this time with his teacher. So I cleaned it and wrapped it and told her to tell him to leave it wrapped. The next day he came in with his mom. Once again no bandage. So once again I cleaned it and told them to keep it wrapped up cuz that’s raw skin under there and eventually the nail will just grow back. Haven’t seen him since, but I hope his nail is growing back. :-P
Pretty gross: A 14 year old boy came in with a nose bleed, so we did the usual hold a cotton ball on it thing, then I stuck a moistened cotton ball up his nose for a few minutes. When I pulled it out (this is gross) this 2-inch long piece of something came out behind it, and my first thoughts were to wonder if it was either a worm or part of his brain (hah) then reality came back and I wondered if it were a blood clot that was snotty or a snot glob that was bloody. :-P Further investigation later on told me it was snot that was bloody. I really love this whole medical thing. :-P
OK IT’S SAFE TO READ NOW
Today I played doctor, this time with the doctor actually there. I took the histories with my small, small Swahili vocabulary, did all the chest-listening and tonsil-viewing, and threw out some diagnoses, and wrote the prescriptions as dictated by someone who actually knew what drugs to prescribe for what. Fun times!
Since I’m going to the middle of the desert in about 2 weeks, I’ve been sitting in the sun for a little each morning to try and get a little tan so I don’t burn quite as easily when I get there. When the kids come outside, it’s so funny how they “interact” with me. Some of them just stand a few feet away and stare at me for 5 minutes or until I stare right back at them and they get uncomfortable. Some of them just keep running back and forth, getting a liiiiittle closer to me each time. And others (usually only the ones around 5-8) just come up and grab my hand and stand against me and giggle.
I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations about food…in which I have told people that I don’t need as much food as they think because my stomach is apparently smaller than they think, and they think I’m lying! To their faces! I ate dinner and said I was full and I was told by 2 different peope that I was lying about being full. I couldn’t comprehend how they could be so incredulous that I’m full after eating what seems a big meal to me, or that they would seriously think I’m lying to them. Obviously people want me to eat more, so if I wasn’t full why would I pretend I’m not? I would just eat more! I don’t get it.
The other day I ate goat for the first time and it tastes very similar to lamb, which I LOVE, so by the transitive property, I love goat also. :-P
Recently I’ve been sneaking doing the dishes whenever Beth leaves the apartment and there are dishes to be done. She came back surprised to see them done and she was very appreciative and said “ok, now I will teach you to cook”. I don’t see the connection, but I am very glad both to be allowed to help with the cooking now, and to be heling with the dishes instead of just sitting around doing nothing while Beth does all the work. While I immensely appreciate everything she’s doing for me, I feel like a terrible person letting her do everything. Mommy be proud, I’m being helpful when I’ve been told to just sit and do nothing. Are you? Are you?
Friday, Sat. and Sun the church has revival services with a pastor from New Zealand. The guy is about 7 feet tall, and so I’ts really funny to see him standing next to the 5ft4 pastor. :-D But it was really good, even though when I got to the church at 5:40 for a 5:30 start, nobody else but the worship team was there until 6 and they didn’t start til 6:30 :-P Also the electricity had gone out around 3 that day so he preched by light of a gas lamp and a just-for-that-day string of light bulbs strung across the sanctuary.
Oh man, this is getting really long, sorry….but here’s a good story!
Beth’s brother, James, who’s one of the doctors, is getting married in April. So on Saturday we went with him and the whole family to the house of his fiancée, Anne, to have the official negotiation of the dowry. So after a short journey on which I got to ride in a public-transportation-crazy-bus-thing called a matatu (where there’s a driver who stays in the bus and a guy who gets out and tries to entice people onto his matatu by basically pushing you to it..even if it’s not going where you want to go……..) to an area of Nairobi called Burabura, we arrived at the fiancée’s family’s house and everyone piled out. Then all the women went in front carrying a giant bag of groceries provided by the future husband, and sang and danced a “we’ve arrived” song. After a short while of singing, the answering call came from inside the locked gate, and they did this call-and-respond thing that got a lot of laughs. I was later informed that the song was something like “we’re here, let us in” and the response was “we won’t let you in, you’re late” then “there was a traffic jam” and “you have phones, you could have called us!” and “we had no electricity yesterday so we could not charge our phones”…etc. (all of this sung in a sing-songy way surrounded by a repeated chorus) Eventually we were let in, everyone greeted everyone, and we ate a LARGE amount of food, everyone (50-ish people?) introduced themselves, there was a devotion, and then the traditional guess-who’s-the-bride game. The bride-to-be and a few other women (none of whom have yet made an appearance) come out with lesos draped over their heads and around their waists, then James has to pick which one is Anne. He was successful, so nobody made fun of him. :-p
Then the parents, the older siblings, and the groom-to-be went into the house to have the negotiation for what the dowry would be. It’s supposed to be one in terms of goats and other items, but in the city they just use the value of a goat or other item, and they get paid a sum of money, that doesn’t actually have to be used for what they say they wanted. So that took probably close to 2 hours…then there was more feasting, a round of porridge for everyone, and we went home. People have asked me how we do it in the US, and they are constantly surprised to find that we don’t do a dowry, and in fact it’s the bride’s family who usually pays for the wedding festivities, and the groom’s the honeymoon.
Warning: This paragraph starts out not gross, gets slightly gross, and then pretty gross. pretty gross is at the end, and then there's a "it's safe to read now" warning when it's over. Behave according to your preference, but don't blame me if you get grossed out, because I WARNED YOU! :-D
So these past few day’s medical interesting-nesses:
Not gross at all: A woman 38 weeks pregnant came in the day the doctor wasn’t there, just me and the pharmacist and the lab tech, to get her BP checked…it was 152/75. So I think…pre-eclampsia. Except I don’t know what the exact numbers are to count as pre-eclampsia or what you do to treat it, and there’s no doctor. So I go get the pharmacist while I look up in a book what they recommend. Complete bed rest and monitoring of BP, for her level of BP. So I ask the pharmacist, and she’s been talking to the parents-to-be and apparently they’ve been going to a different clinic during the pregnancy, so she sent them back there. So I’m praying “God please let there be a doctor there who actually knows what they’re doing because I don’t have a cluuuuuuue!” And today I was telling the Dr. about it and he goes “that’s an immediate referral to a hospital for delivery. Especially since she was so far along” Great. So I hope she got induced and soon, because there’s a lot of bad things that could happen with high BP, and really very low chance of anything going wrong when you deliver only 2 weeks early. Now I know.
(Hence why I find it absurd that the pharmacist kept trying to get me to see patients when the Dr. wasn’t there. I don’t have a license to practice medicine, I’m not going to start presecribing meds! I don’t even know what meds to prescribe! )
Anyway.
Slightly gross: kid came in with his thumb nail mostly detached. Lucky for him, the nail bed was intact, so I cleaned it and wrapped it and told him to leave it. Comes bac the next day with no bandage and it’s dirty, this time with his teacher. So I cleaned it and wrapped it and told her to tell him to leave it wrapped. The next day he came in with his mom. Once again no bandage. So once again I cleaned it and told them to keep it wrapped up cuz that’s raw skin under there and eventually the nail will just grow back. Haven’t seen him since, but I hope his nail is growing back. :-P
Pretty gross: A 14 year old boy came in with a nose bleed, so we did the usual hold a cotton ball on it thing, then I stuck a moistened cotton ball up his nose for a few minutes. When I pulled it out (this is gross) this 2-inch long piece of something came out behind it, and my first thoughts were to wonder if it was either a worm or part of his brain (hah) then reality came back and I wondered if it were a blood clot that was snotty or a snot glob that was bloody. :-P Further investigation later on told me it was snot that was bloody. I really love this whole medical thing. :-P
OK IT’S SAFE TO READ NOW
Today I played doctor, this time with the doctor actually there. I took the histories with my small, small Swahili vocabulary, did all the chest-listening and tonsil-viewing, and threw out some diagnoses, and wrote the prescriptions as dictated by someone who actually knew what drugs to prescribe for what. Fun times!
Since I’m going to the middle of the desert in about 2 weeks, I’ve been sitting in the sun for a little each morning to try and get a little tan so I don’t burn quite as easily when I get there. When the kids come outside, it’s so funny how they “interact” with me. Some of them just stand a few feet away and stare at me for 5 minutes or until I stare right back at them and they get uncomfortable. Some of them just keep running back and forth, getting a liiiiittle closer to me each time. And others (usually only the ones around 5-8) just come up and grab my hand and stand against me and giggle.
I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations about food…in which I have told people that I don’t need as much food as they think because my stomach is apparently smaller than they think, and they think I’m lying! To their faces! I ate dinner and said I was full and I was told by 2 different peope that I was lying about being full. I couldn’t comprehend how they could be so incredulous that I’m full after eating what seems a big meal to me, or that they would seriously think I’m lying to them. Obviously people want me to eat more, so if I wasn’t full why would I pretend I’m not? I would just eat more! I don’t get it.
The other day I ate goat for the first time and it tastes very similar to lamb, which I LOVE, so by the transitive property, I love goat also. :-P
Recently I’ve been sneaking doing the dishes whenever Beth leaves the apartment and there are dishes to be done. She came back surprised to see them done and she was very appreciative and said “ok, now I will teach you to cook”. I don’t see the connection, but I am very glad both to be allowed to help with the cooking now, and to be heling with the dishes instead of just sitting around doing nothing while Beth does all the work. While I immensely appreciate everything she’s doing for me, I feel like a terrible person letting her do everything. Mommy be proud, I’m being helpful when I’ve been told to just sit and do nothing. Are you? Are you?
Friday, Sat. and Sun the church has revival services with a pastor from New Zealand. The guy is about 7 feet tall, and so I’ts really funny to see him standing next to the 5ft4 pastor. :-D But it was really good, even though when I got to the church at 5:40 for a 5:30 start, nobody else but the worship team was there until 6 and they didn’t start til 6:30 :-P Also the electricity had gone out around 3 that day so he preched by light of a gas lamp and a just-for-that-day string of light bulbs strung across the sanctuary.
Oh man, this is getting really long, sorry….but here’s a good story!
Beth’s brother, James, who’s one of the doctors, is getting married in April. So on Saturday we went with him and the whole family to the house of his fiancée, Anne, to have the official negotiation of the dowry. So after a short journey on which I got to ride in a public-transportation-crazy-bus-thing called a matatu (where there’s a driver who stays in the bus and a guy who gets out and tries to entice people onto his matatu by basically pushing you to it..even if it’s not going where you want to go……..) to an area of Nairobi called Burabura, we arrived at the fiancée’s family’s house and everyone piled out. Then all the women went in front carrying a giant bag of groceries provided by the future husband, and sang and danced a “we’ve arrived” song. After a short while of singing, the answering call came from inside the locked gate, and they did this call-and-respond thing that got a lot of laughs. I was later informed that the song was something like “we’re here, let us in” and the response was “we won’t let you in, you’re late” then “there was a traffic jam” and “you have phones, you could have called us!” and “we had no electricity yesterday so we could not charge our phones”…etc. (all of this sung in a sing-songy way surrounded by a repeated chorus) Eventually we were let in, everyone greeted everyone, and we ate a LARGE amount of food, everyone (50-ish people?) introduced themselves, there was a devotion, and then the traditional guess-who’s-the-bride game. The bride-to-be and a few other women (none of whom have yet made an appearance) come out with lesos draped over their heads and around their waists, then James has to pick which one is Anne. He was successful, so nobody made fun of him. :-p
Then the parents, the older siblings, and the groom-to-be went into the house to have the negotiation for what the dowry would be. It’s supposed to be one in terms of goats and other items, but in the city they just use the value of a goat or other item, and they get paid a sum of money, that doesn’t actually have to be used for what they say they wanted. So that took probably close to 2 hours…then there was more feasting, a round of porridge for everyone, and we went home. People have asked me how we do it in the US, and they are constantly surprised to find that we don’t do a dowry, and in fact it’s the bride’s family who usually pays for the wedding festivities, and the groom’s the honeymoon.
FUN STUFF! It's hard to believe I'm actually leaving this place in 2 weeks, I'm getting more comfortable here each day, so it will be interesting to see how hopping around feels. If anything I'll get really good at adapting? We shall seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Thursday, February 3, 2011
In which I take a shower, have a death wish, and make my 888th attempt to plan to see Heidi. ;-)
Here’s some stuff that yesterday’s blog post was getting really long, so I moved it to today. :-D
Last week I was invited to a Bible Study for the worship team…felt slightly awkward, not being on the worship team, but it was such a great experience just being in that setting….of course everyone was quite welcoming and they even tried to use Swahili as little as possible so I could understand, though they sometimes have to slip into it because it’s easier for them to get a point across in their native language…no blame there. But even though I didn’t really know any of them but 1 person, and not even that well, just being in a room with a small group of young people messing around and making jokes and eventually talking about the Bible was something I hadn’t done in a long time and it was reminiscent of Chi Alpha so it was a good time. J
Sunday afternoon after church I went home with the Basses (the American missionaries who are in charge of the clinics) because there was this “prayer and praise” gathering Sun. night at the area..or regional…director’s house. So it was a potluck and I ate lots of American food and hung out with basically all the AG missionaries in Nairobi, we had worship, prayer, and a devotional/teaching and it was nice to be in that environment…it’s like I understood everyone and how their minds worked! And we heard about this hospital in Somaliland(small unrecognized area of Somalia that’s trying to secede and be its own country because it doesn’t want to take part in all the tribal warfare going on) that was built by some really rich Somalis who were for some reason in America…and its brand new and gorgeous and well-equipped with stuff except it’s empty because they have nobody to staff it. And the director was BEGGING the AG missionary there to send people to train their staff, teachers, anyone who speaks English..knowing they were missionaries (this is a Muslim stronghold, where you get killed for converting to Christianity or being a Christian who evangelizes, and it’s so unstable you need an armed guard escort everywhere) but they were still begging him to send people. It’s basically unreached, there are no churches anywhere and very, very few Christians.
I was telling Mommy Jayne about that and her first words were “Danielle, I don’t want you to go there!” so I promised her not this trip, maybe next time though. :-P
So I spent that night at the Bass house and took a hot shower in the morning. And used a toilet. Blessings.
The other day I had a funny conversation with my host and her sister-in-law about the different ways we eat the same foods in the US and Kenya…we had a lot of laughs, as they were shocked at some of the things we do…
Sandwiches are lunch (here, breakfast…though it’s either butter, butter and jam, or one piece of meat and the whole thing’s toasted…not the giant piles of ham cheese turkey, mayonnaise, etc. that we eat), Hamburgers are lunch/dinner (here, “snack”), tea made mostly with water and a little milk!?, People drink cold milk straight!? People use cold milk in cereal!? You don’t eat hotdogs for breakfast? You don’t cook your meat all the way through!? And on and on. It was quite funny not that we did things differently, but how surprised everyone was to hear exactly what strange things we did in the US with our food. :-P
I’m gonna see HEIDI!
This is our…I lost count…attempt to make plans to get together while here. But we have a plan that’s the most finalized any plan we’ve had so far as been, and basically about as final as plans get in Africa, so the plan iiiiis: I’m going to Sombo (middle-of-nowhere-in-the-desert-no-electiricty-or-running-water-and-oh-did-I-mention-it-takes-5-minutes-to-get-sunburned?) from Feb 18th until March 7th-ish, then I’m coming back to Nairobi and shortly after I get back here HEIDI’S GONNA BE HERE with Dr. Val!! And then we’re going to take the train to Mombasa and chilax there for a couple days and then come back to Nairobi, where Heidi will go back to Uganda to fly home to all of you people, and I’ll get in a car and drive back to Mombasa for a missions conference. :-D How cool is THAT!? :-DWednesday, February 2, 2011
In which my laundry goes flying onto someone else's roof, and water begins to fall from a shower head!
It’s been a while! My internet was sketchy last week because I ran out of credits and they’re not that expensive, but I didn’t have access to anywhere selling scratch cards in amounts larger than 50 shillings…so I was on minimal internet for the week.
Some interesting observations from the past week:
People’s perceptions of America/Americans….they’re so different from each other and so different from my perceptions of America/Americans!
I was mobbed (not really…but “mobbed” sounds more exciting) on the street the other day because there was a guy raising money for a person who got shot (I didn’t find out what was actually going on until a few minutes later) because I’m white, and white apparently = endless supply of money.
Today Jeff told me that he was surprised to learn not-too-long ago that there are street kids and homeless people in America as well.
Some people have told me they want to go live there, can I write them a letter of invitation (sorry, no, it’s not that easy…) while others have said they’d like to visit “Great, let me know what you think of it after you visit!” :-P and others have said they would never want to go because they heard black people are not treated well there. (“Yes, there’s still some issues in some places with prejudice, but for the most part we’ve put and are putting that behind us as a country. Don’t let that be a reason to not like the US!”)
I think a lot of people here don’t realize that there’s a working class in the US as well. Not everyone is making more money than they know what to do with and in fact, most people work hard for what they have, and would have trouble paying for school, food, clothing, etc. if they lost their jobs…just like here!
Here is the medical paragraph: Skip it if you don’t care about the purely medical mumbo-jumbo
A couple days after the last abscess we had another (smaller) one at the clinic and I got to pop that one too…less fun because it was smaller, but still exciting. :-D
When I first got here, Jeff said he didn’t do a lot of suturing. We’ve had two kids hit their heads on their desks and need stitches in a week! What’s really amusing though is…1. It always causes a huge commotion because scalp lacerations have this funny tendency to GUSH blood for a very short time and then just stop…so everyone freaks out at the beginning but it’s never as big of a deal as it looks like it’s going to be.
Also, the only suture material we have here is attached to these GIANT, 4cm long needles as opposed to the 1-2cm long needles we’d use if we had them…especially on the face, and especially on kids’ faces. But that’s what we’ve got so these poor kids get almost as big of a hole in their heads for the stitching to pass through as they did when they smashed their head on the desk. Thank God for lidocaine….
There’ve been a couple asthma attacks, and one kid had pneumonia really bad, it was loud when I listened with the stethoscope. And another case of it that wasn’t audible but you could tell just by the way he was breathing (nostrils flaring, and his whole abdomen moving with every breath) that he has fluid in his lungs. There was a little boy with a narsty fungal infection on the back of his head and his elbow….the ONLY medical thing that grosses me out is skin diseases…so I wasn’t too excited about that one.
Got a blood pressure 2 days ago that was 200/110…and that wasn’t even that high for this guy. He hadn’t taken his meds in a while so he got some, and was down to 150/I forget by the next day.
Funny Story: So the laundry all gets hung to dry on a clothesline on the 4th floor, where we are, and it’s very windy. So someone was hanging up or taking down my laundry when my wrap/sarong/khanga/whatever you like to call it blew away…so later that day we had to go search for it from the balcony. We located it on someone’s roof one building over, a one-story building. So we went to knock on their door and ask if we could please climb up on their roof and retrieve it, and so we did. :-D
I also may or may not have used the “hide the food you don’t like in your napkin and roll it up and throw it away” trick with liver the 2nd time I had to eat it……may or may not.
I was told (through translation a few minutes after the fact) by a butcher that I did not look American because I’d shaved my head…he thought I looked Chinese.
The most AMAZING thing happened today. I walked into the washroom to …use the washroom, and water dripped on my head from above. I looked up and saw, to my great surprise, the old rusted shower head that’s been sitting there who knows how long, was dripping water. The other day someone connected a hose to the tank-of-a-toilet-bowl-looking thing and it’s been dripping nonstop since, but I haven’t been able to get it to flush…but today I tried the shower nozzle and water came out of the overhead showerhead! Now granted this is cold water but it’s nice to see. So I got all inspired by the running water and, realizing my legs needed shaving, shaved them using the spigot 2 ft off the ground. Running water has never been a terribly exciting thing to me until today.
When it’s not there, I don’t sit and daydream about missing it at all…but when it appears after a while, I’m especially thankful for it.
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