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 2^nd 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