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.

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!