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 4^th 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 2^nd 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.