pffft

I was gonna write a normal post, but that will come tomorrow I think.

Remember how I said Naivasha was perfect? Well let's think of a city in the US with the exact OPPOSITE weather. No sun, feet and feet and feet of snow, cold all the time, basically in Canada...yes, Buffalo, NY. It was my 2nd-to-last-choice medical school at first, only because of the location. The school itself is everything I was looking for though.

I've always wanted to go to medical school in New York City. Since I was 14 at least. So God knew if I got accepted to a school in NYC, I'd have gone there over all the other schools, even if it had been something like Hopkins or Harvard (not that I even bothered applying to either of those places). So I'm seeing now that God didn't want me in NYC, since I didn't get into any of the 4 schools I applied to there. So we were down to Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Los Angeles. I didn't want to go to LA, because of location, and I was a bit relieved, even, when I got a "no thank you" email from them. So now we were down to Buffalo and Philly. Philly is just about half the distance from Carmel as Buffalo, and warmer, so Philly it was...and then today I got an email from them too. So after a brief moment of panic and several seconds of asking God if He was intentionally TRYING to drive me insane or not, I have no choice but to trust Him that I'll get a different answer from Buffalo. And I cannot fathom why (I tell God "this had better be good") I should need to be in Buffalo (well I have some ideas, but nothing that couldn't happen in some place closer and less snowy. You all know how I feel about snow, right!? [I sort of hate it]).

So all the medical schools are reaching the end of their decision-making process...which means they have x interview spots left and 4x applicaitons left, and they have to one by one weed people out until they get x people to offer interviews to. So it's sort of a good sign that it took/is taking this long, I'm still in the running.

So my mom has a client of hers that she regularly massages who is a doctor who graduated from Buffalo many years ago, who decided she wanted to write me a letter of recommendation to add to my pile. Oh yeah, and she personally knows the director of admissions. So I talked to her on the phone and she wrote and sent in a very nice letter for me addressed directly to him.

So now I have no choice but to trust that I'll get into Buffalo
and now I have no choice but to very humbling-ly know that it really had nothing to do with my grades (which were okay...) or my extracurriculars (which were moderately impressive) and essay (which I've been told was really good...) , but everything relating to me getting in to med school was actually an act of God.

While that makes me feel good to think that God's acting on my behalf, it's quite a blow to my pride/ego/fear of judgement/call it what you will.

SO PRAY

that God's will happens...as much as I can barely comprehend the thought, even if it's not med school or at least not right now. Because I know that any plans I have for myself, if they're not the same as God's I don't want them to happen. Even if I think I'm getting everything I ever wanted, and that I'm happy...I am not as happy as I could have been had I been in God's perfect plan.

Heidi, I had a dream about this exact situation...typing a blog post about Buffalo. NOT Deja vu. :-P

The end.

In which I go to Naivashaaaaaaaa, and can't think of anything more exciting to put in my title

Naivash is…perfect.
Well, the weather at least. The journey here is gorgeous, and it rained a little last week so the rift valley is starting to turn green. The giant crevice in the middle of Kenya, with a giant volcano in the middle of the crevice, is going to be LUSH by the time I get back to Nairobi, and I can’t wait to see it again. J
But Naivasha weather is really perfect. It’s nice and warm during the day, in the 70s, and if you go outside the sun feels good on your skin, but not too hot. Sitting inside is nice and cool, and at night it gets breezy and as long as you close the windows it’s cool and juuuust the perfect temperature for falling asleep. By the time you wake up, it’s gotten a little warm again.
Also, as my mom has told me 5 or 6 or 15 times, something like 60% of the world's roses come from Naivasha. I have not seen even one yet...but I haven't been out much.

The clinic here is pretty new so we’re still working on the getting the word out, so traffic is pretty slow. The doctor here is named Edwin. The lack of many patients allowed us to spend a couple hours the first day putting all the pills of expired drugs into a bag for disposal, because apparently they smell really bad when you burn them so we couldn’t burn them with the rest of the garbage. We poured out all the bottles and popped all the pills out of their little blister packs…it was kind of fun, actually. The best part was squeezing 5 or 6 tubes of expired antibiotic ointment out of the tubes. I’ve always wanted to do that. :-P Then today I spent 2.5 hours taking all the drugs off the shelves in the pharmacy and dusting off the containers and the shelves. It gets quite dusty here until it rains, and it’s juuust starting to rain so it was pretty dirty. But it’s raining now so my work won’t be undone as immediately as I thought it was going to. :-P
Also, there is a thermometer in the clinic that you’re supposed to shine this red light into the patient’s mouth, and it tells you the temperature. !?!? The doctor shined it at the kid’s forehead (I don’t think he realized that it was blinking “oral”) and it said 93 farenheit…I don’t think he also realized that that must be inaccurate, because nobody’s temperature is 93 when they have no problems other than a cough...but he’s probably used to celcius and just knows what counts as “bad” in F and doesn’t realize how far off 93 is from normal, let alone high. The kid could have been 102 and it probably would have said 93. I shined the light in my mouth and it said 99, then 98.3, then 97, and it said the air was 73 when I pointed it at nothing. So..I sort of doubt the accuracy of the thing, I can’t fathom how shining a red light in my mouth can tell you my core temperature, but it’s a pretty cool little contraption at least.

So my living situation here:
There’s a big compound with the church, offices, the clinic, and a few buildings for the school/classrooms/more offices. Then there’s the “group home”, as they call it, which has a little porch, living room, dining room, kitchen with back-porch wood stove, 2 bedrooms for the 5 middle-and-high-school girls, a small bed-and-living-room-apartment for the caretaker, Nancy, and bathrooms (flushing pit latrine!) The clinic is 87 steps away from the door of the house. Yes I counted!
There’s running water and sinks but it doesn’t get hot, so we heat the water for showers on the stove and mix with cold water to take a bucket shower. The girls here have a rotation for cooking and cleaning and what not, so I’m hoping to get them to teach me some Kenyan cooking while I’m here. They’re much better at letting me help than adults have been! Last night we all spent a half hour digging through a giant bowl of maize picking out the stones and bad kernels.

I was worried about the predicament of being treated like a visitor for the duration of my stay, but when we arrived we informed the pastor and Nancy that I didn’t want any special treatment, just pretend I’m one of the girls, so they decided I would get special visitor treatment for the first 2 days, and then I can be a non-visitor. I can definitely deal with that. J

When the girls all got home from school yesterday, I was saying hi and they were all giggling and hiding behind each other and not making eye contact, but after talking a little with them (they are still learning English and I am still learning Swahili, so it’s interesting…though I’ve added a few more words to my vocabulary after a lesson last night) they’ve gotten less timid ,though they still smile and laugh whenever they see me. In time I’m sure they’ll get used to it and then we can be friends. :-P

Well I am going to go see what’s cooking in the kitchen and what else there is to do around here!

In which I basically just spend a lot of time in the sun

I am currently darker than I’ve ever been in my life. Buuuut that still isn’t dark enough to be able to walk around the beach in Mombasa without being followed around by 4 beach boys looking to sell me things. Even if I go for a walk and make no effort to slow down, or show the slightest bit of interest in what they’ve lined up in the sand, I am greeted from 30 feet away, welcomed, and informed that “looking is free”(haha!) If I stand still, and then turn my head 1 degree in someone’s direction, they just JUMP on the opportunity to try and sell me something. At first I laugh, but it doesn’t take long for me to get frustrated by it. The other day I had a very short conversation on the beach right in front of our hotel, and then said I wanted to just walk and think, and as I turned to walk away the guy said “I love you!” I said “You don’t know me well enough to love me” he said “Yes I do, you are beautiful” and I said “that’s not love, that’s lust” and walked away. Insert eye-roll here. :-p

So other than that sort of thing, we spent a wonderfully relaxing week with meetings in the mornings and services at night, with lots of pool and beach related lounging in between. One day we did jet skis/those hot dog/banana things you sit on and get pulled around by a boat, but mostly we just did whatever we felt like on the resort. Yesterday I took a walk some incredibly long distance down the beach with Danny and Joseph (Danny being my host missionary and Joseph being my pretend little brother, who’s more of a pretend same-size brother, because he’s 13 and we have at this moment exactly the same height, and haircut, haha) to explore these caves that I’d heard about…we had nooo idea how interesting of a cave it was, or if it was just going to be a crevice, but we got there and it was pretty interesting…I would have liked it much better if we didn’t have to walk for a full 40 minutes along the hot, shelly sand just to get there, and then again to get back…but someday if I go back I’m going to take a motorized vehicle out to those coral-dug-out-by-the-water cave/cavern/clif-ish things and spend a couple hours while the tide’s out exploring them with sneakers. J

It’s really weird, being on a very family vacation sort of vacation, with a bunch of families…without my family. I couldn’t help thinking how we’d NEVER have a vacation like this, because my mom can’t spend more than one day in a row doing nothing on the beach/poolside. We’d have to find more non-sitting things to do each day. Everyone was very group-y and welcomed me in and what not…I was never sitting by myself unless I wanted to be, but it still felt a bit like I was intruding on other people’s family vacations, even if all the families were mixed together all the time. I did a lot of wondering how much I should invite myself into group conversations and how much I should just stay where I was…I don’t know where the balance is between being social and overstepping my welcome, if I may combine two expressions, so I tend to err on the side of caution (if I may now use a third. :-P)

We left this morning at 4am, and got back to Nairobi around 11, but didn’t get to where we were eating lunch until around 12:30 because that’s how bad traffic is in Nairobi…while they’re busy doubling the size of the main road, it’s been halved. Also, there’s no such thing as a highway that goes around a city, with an exit you get off to go into the city so if you’re passing by, or driving to the other side of the city you can just go around it. You just gotta deal with the traffic. Woo hoo!

Monday I’m going to Naivasha, my next clinic stop, to be there for a month…I forget if I said this already or not so I’ll just tell you again- there’s a church there and a school and clinic and some housing buildings, all within a gated compound. I’ll be living in a group home with 6-ish 5-7^th grade girls (orphans) who go to the school. So I’m quiiite excited about that, my very limited interactions with the girls that age so far have been a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to it for an extended period.

Soooooooooo this has been my break, we will return to the regularly scheduled programming on Monday-ish I guess!

In which I FEEL rather than hear lungs crackling, and go to Mombasa for the second time in as many weeks

Apparently, I just can’t stay away from Mombasa!

Well, we diiiid end up going snorkeling just at the coral reef, off a little catamaran, and it was preeeeetty cool. Except that my goggles were leaking salt water into the space my nose was supposed to be occupying. And that my snorkel was filling up with drool, basically, because I was trying not to swallow, because I didn’t want to taste the salt. So…uncomfortable, but very interesting to see. Even waaay out in the ocean the water was still only about 10 ft deep before the reef. We asked if we could go past the reef, where all the waves were breaking, but the fishermen or sailors or whatever you’d like to call them said there were sharks and it wouldn’t be safe. So we stayed back and saw just what you’d expect…some fish and lots of coral and urchins and unfortunately, jellyfish. Heidi got stung on the nose, and Jennifer got one caught on her leg that ended up being quite painful afterwards. We suggested peeing on it but nobody was interested in volunteering. Instead we tried another potential remedy, tea. That didn’t work either…maybe because it was hot, and spiced tea? But then the medical half of all our brains kicked in, and Benadryl was taken, and that actually helped. :-D

Our last day was just gorgeous peaceful relaxing by the pool, trying to cut open and scrape out the meat from a coconut shell, when there was all of a sudden a crowd of people standing at one end of the pool. We went over to see, and there was a maybe 9-year old boy who’d just nearly drowned. Someone’d pulled him out and a retired nurse who was nearby started CPR and he coughed out a bunch of water. We got there to see what was going on about a minute after that. He was conscious and had good capillary refill and wasn’t looking blue but you could actually FEEL the water rumbling around in his lungs by putting your hand on his rib cage. So some people went to find his parents (his older brother had been watching him, but left to go pay at the front desk because they weren’t staying at the hotel, so had to pay to use the pool) to tell them he should go to a doctor to get some antibiotics, because he’s pretty much guaranteed to have a nasty case of pneumonia after that incident. So all was well, and after that adventure to liven up our afternoon, we headed back to town to get on the train!

The next morning we stayed in the dining car a while after we’d finished breakfast and were looking out the windows over the grassland we were passing through, and it was better than a safari, almost! We saw gazelles, impalas, wildebeest, hartebeest (the ugly duckling cousin of the wildebeest), bustards (some silly-looking bird), giraffes, and lions…sitting AMONG the wildebeest. I guess they’re pretty forgiving, and after the lion eats a few of their friends for lunch they know he’s not hungry for a while and so don’t mind hanging out with him??
But we weren’t even going through a game park, so it was preeeeeeetty cool to get to see all those animals!

Now ‘s the sad part. When we got off the train we took a taxi to the bus station where I had to say bye to my Heidi so she could go back home to New YORK (where she has arrived safely by now) and to my new friends who I very much enjoyed meeting and getting to know. Also, I have the skin of an old woman who’s spent too much time in the sun on my shoulders, except where it’s peeled and left me nice baby-fresh skin. So the contrast is kind of scary and I think it looks like I have leprosy. :-p

Theeeeen I went back to my home base, the Bass’ house.
Monday morning we went to EAST- The East Africa School of Theology- for the dedication of the new clinic they’ve just opened there. It’s right across the street from a very busy shopping center, on a main road, so it should get a good number of people. There was a short indoor ceremony where Chrissy and Dr. James spoke for a little about the clinic and the vision of the clinic, and announced to the students that it would be completely free to them (applause), then we went outside for the official dedication prayer and cutting of the ribbon and revealing of the dedication plaque (which has some black electrical tape over the “erend” part of “reverend” because someone spelled it wrong when they said it was dedicated by “reverend…I forget his name” .

Afterwards Dr. James wrote us out and handed us invitations to his wedding on April 9^th. I’ve never watched someone write out my invitation to…anything…before, or been handed a wedding invitation…but there is a very good chance any mail you send won’t make it to its destination, so it’s better this way. So I’m quite excited to go to a Kenyan wedding and see how everything’s done, especially since I also was at the dowry negotiation for this one. I didn’t really bring anything to wear to a wedding though. hmmmmmm

Soooooooooooooooooo Then I basically just killed a day and a half relaxing and re-packing for THIS Mombasa trip. It’s a conference/gathering/team meeting-slash-family vacation for all the AG missionaries in Nairobi. We left at 5am today and will be here until the 25^th. My very small job here is to, with another girl who’s here for 4 months living with another missionary family, entertain/occupy/babysit the 5-12 year olds 3 of the days while the parents are in a meeting for like 2 hours in the morning. Other than that, I’m pretty much beaching it up for a couple days…a 3 minute walk from where I was last week.

So hooray for vacation time! Next week I’ll be heading to either Naivasha or Limuru to stay there for a month at the clinic (I’ve heard both, so I’m not sure which one is true…but it never does matter anyways…this is, after all, Africa. ;-) )

Hey lookie here!
Chi Alpha is taking their annual spring break missions trip to the Dominican Republic and they’re leaving this weekend, coming back….you guessed it, next weekend, so if you would be so kind as to keep the team in your prayers that would be fantastic! They’re working with an organization called Book of Hope to distribute books (of hope) with the gospel story (hence the hope)(geared towards several different age/understanding levels) to hundreds and hundreds of school kids, and doing skits and sharing testimonies for the week. So pray that God does awesome things in their lives and the kids’ lives!

Somehow I’m getting tired around 10 these days…long gone are my stay up til 3 and sleep til noon days…Mom is really excited about that one, but I’m bummed about not having slept past 8:30 in over 2 months. Even the days I can sleep are interrupted by my self waking myself up, or some random dog or rooster or car or leaf rustling too loudly. Maybe tomorrow? Unlikely, but I can hope.

PICTURES from Mombasa are here

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2504201&id=428882&l=966c169676

You should be able to see that even if you're not on facebook!

In which I FINALLY see Heidi, and taste a plethora of new foods in Mombasa

MOMBASA IS HOT!

Even in Sombo, it was really cool until around 10am when the sun appeared. But here, it’s hot already at like 8:20, because the sun doesn’t have anything to hide behind until then, since it’s rising over the Indian Ocean. But it’s gorgeous and we are having a fantastic time. I missed my Heidi!

Wednesday morning Heidi, Dr. Val, and Jennifer arrived on a bus from Uganda and came to the Bass’ house. I was in the shower when I heard the car pull up and I looked out the window to see the van, so I cut the shower short and did the fastest drying-off-and-getting-dressed I’ve ever done so I could run outside and give her a BIG FAT hug. We are veeeeeeeery excited to be in Africa and most excitingly in the same spot in Africa at the same time!!

Let me introduce some people to you: You know Heidi. :-P Dr. Val is a vet that has been a missionary to Uganda for 19 years now, and Heidi has been staying with her for the past 7 months doing vet mission-y things. Jennifer is a missionary nurse to Uganda that Heidi and Val have worked with when in Soroti.
So we killed some time in the morning (they arrived around 6am) watching TV slash sleeping slash talking on the couches, then Chrissy dropped us off at this country club that had hiking trails and a pool and places to eat. So we spent the afternoon there relaxing and walking along the trails and catching up. We went to a shopping center for lunch and so Dr. Val could meet with a Kenyan pastor she works with sometimes to do camel training/revolving loans (you give someone a camel, they give you back the firstborn and keep the camel, so they get a camel and keep the stock alive) then we bought some fruit and juice for the train ride because all us recently-been-in-the-desert people really like juice. :-P

Soooo we got on the train and had an uneventful ride, we had dinner on the train while being serenaded by a guy with a guitar playing an interesting combination of songs, from “In the Jungle” to “Stand by me” to “Killing me Softly” and the Swahili songs “Malaika” and “Jambo Bwana”. Then we headed back for some dark chocolate and sleepy-time….but not before we made the straps designed to keep us inside the top bunks into a spider web in the middle of the room so Heidi and I could enjoy being in a hammock. :-P When we woke up, we were pretty close, we had breakfast and hung out in our cabin for a while and waved to the many little kids who ran over to the track to wave to us, as they heard the train coming.
We arrived on Mombasa and took a taxi to our hostel…it’s like a resort, made for Christian conferences, but they have some rooms that are dorm-style that are much cheaper, so we’re staying there. It was interesting trying to pay…since we had miscommunicated the price, and three of the 4 of us spend most of the time in Uganda, so we had an interesting time coming up with enough money in the correct currency to pay for the rooms, since they wanted payment for all 3 nights up front. But eventually we figured it out, and headed for the showers, which felt REALLY nice after being on the hot train all night. Then we went to the ocean, where the tide was out and it was flat for quite a distance. We walked out for a while and saw sea cucumbers, urchins, lots of crabs, coral, and starfish. When the tide started to come in we went back and jumped in the pool. The ocean water (being really shallow) was hotter than most of the bathing I’ve done in Kenya, so the pool, which was probably about 87 degrees, felt nice, but was also really warm. So we hung out there for a while then came back to our room to eat the second half of our dinner that we’d brought with us…the first half being some hibiscus flowers and the leaves of a tree Val said were edible. :-D We brushed our teeth just for fun with the small branches of the Neem tree, you peel back the bark, chew the end of the stick into a brush, and brush away. It felt surprisingly clean and even lasted longer than normal teeth brushing, I think. After dinner we had tea but no cups, so we used our juice boxes from earlier in the day to drink the tea. They’ve been wanting to try acupuncture on the numb spot on Heidi’s back, but haven’t had the needles…Val just got the needles from the states so we practiced on each other a little with her guidance, just for fun, and then headed to bed!

Thursday morning we went to the ocean again, but walked along the shore instead of out, and mostly just stepped in the muddy sand. Some locals climbed a coconut tree for us and cut open a few coconuts so we could drink the water. They were too young to have the expected meat yet but it was cool to drink directly from a fresh-picked coconut!
After we wandered a while, we were starting to burn so we spread the sulfur-y concrete mix-y mud that we were walking in on our backs and shoulders as sunscreen, and wandered around the beach…there may have been a short mud-flinging fight in the middle of there, started by Heidi and Val of COURSE. :-P After a nice long shower we hopped in the pool again for a while, then went into town..called…Mtwapa, or something like that, to go to the bank and get some groceries. We had chapati for lunch at a little “hotel”(what you call a restaurant) and then got some fruit juice from a fruit stand, then took a ride on some bodabodas back to the hostel. I thought “my mother would kill me if she knew I was doing this” but it IS the cheapest way to travel around here, and fun, and an interesting experience, so we did it anyways. :P (don’t worry mommy, I didn’t wear a helmet either. :-P but the fastest we went was like 25mph…so it wasn’t thaaaat bad) During the ride I told Heidi the story of the man my parents rescued from a motorcycle accident where he ripped his chest open on a guard rail. :-D

So theeen we went back and relaxed some, and then we met up with the fishermen we’d met on the beach the day before, with whom Val had arranged to bring us some fish, a chicken, and some octopus. They said they would roast it for us on the beach. So we watched them as they made a fire of coconut husks, tenderized the octopus by smashing it repeatedly against the concrete, and then wrapped it around a stick for roasting. The fish got a stick through their mouths to hold them flat, then a small branch was split down the middle. The fish were wedged in the split then tied in. They slaughtered the chicken on the beach, then they plucked it and gutted it and put it on a stick. The intestines got their own roasting stick…the feet and the head were wedged in a stick like the fish, and the liver got speared. All the sticks got jabbed into the sand, angled over the fire, for roasting. We also brought some onions, peppers, zucchini, and eggplant and made kebabs. THEN they took a coconut tree branch and wove a mat to use as a tabletop for us, it was awesome.
Soooo after a while of cooking the food was all ready and we ate! I started with the chicken intestines, since everyone else at the table had already eaten intestine…it wasn’t too bad, but this was a tiny chicken, not like the large chunks of cow intestine Heidi’s had to eat (haha). Then we ate some fish (meh), some octopus tentacle (not as nasty as I was expecting…the fire roasted the suction cups so it wasn’t gross like my brain made it seem like it would be) I ate some fish testicle, chicken heart, spleen, and liver, and also the comb and a couple bites of connective tissue (well it certainly wasn’t meat) off the feet…none particularly good, but interesting experiences. Then we ate actual chicken breast meat and it was quite good.
The grand finale of our beach feast was roasting marshmallows and making smores over the coconut husk fire. Good stuff! The best part? This WHOLE thing only cost $10. For all 4 of us, combined. $10. How’s THAT for a good deal!?

This evening we’re planning on taking a boat out to the reef and snorkeling! I am QUITE excited for that!

I think it’s about time for lunch, so off I go! Don’t be too jealous, all you New Yorkers, that A. I’m with Heidi and your’e not, and B. I’m in a warm ocean with a warm breeze getting hot and sunburned and you’re braving another snowstorm, okay? Ok, good.

In which I ditch the desert, but not before becoming a Watta and starting my first IV

So first silly things first.

This is apparently an exercise in faith and humility. I’m following the advice of my biological and heavenly fathers when I do this, and I don’t want to do it but I’m being a good little girl and obeying. :-P
I heard from a couple medical schools….bad things, that they don’t love me, but I shouldn’t hate myself because they had lots of applications and it’s very competitive. (I actually find the condolence letter highly amusing, I feel like they’re trying to convince someone not to get depressed or suicidal after the 1^st depressing sentence by saying “comforting” things) So. I’m not really worried….yet…because really, I don’t care if I only get into one school, as long as I get into one…and I’ve still got a few I haven’t heard from yet. So I’m just trusting God and knowing that this is what he wants me to do and so it’s gonna happen. The only reason I stress out is because I worry “aaaaaaaah what if I’ve got it all wrong and somehow this isn’t God’s plan and I don’t get in anywhere, what am I going to TELL people!?” so I’m doing the whole “humble before humiliation” thing…or something…and saying PRAY for the other few applications (which still includes my first choice…and the last choice that is a couple thousand miles away from home) that I haven’t heard from yet. Kay?
Daddy Gerard, was that good?
Gah I hate writing that paragraph and posting it because my PLAN was to not say anything to anyone until I had a nice little acceptance to tell people about. Grrr. So don’t get offended if I didn’t say anything because this all happened within the last internet-free week and I made my family zip their lips and throw away the key, but I wasn’t really going to tell anyone anyways even if they ASKED unless you were extra extra special and since nobody has asked nobody knows if they count as extra extra special or not. :-P

Bah.
anyways. Back to the fun stories:
This week there were a couple days I dressed like the locals and pretended to be a Watta, one of the tribes in the area. The nurse, Margaret, has a 9-month old daughter, and one of the older women from the village comes to watch her during the day so Margaret can go to the clinic. So I had her teach me how to tie the leso like them (the ones they wear are basically strips of cloth about 5 ft high and something like 20 ft. long, and you wrap and tie them and ta da, a dress!) so everyone was apparently very excited to see me dressed like one of them, they started calling me “hawatta” (the Watta word for “Watta”) and telling me I would marry a Watta. I get even more funny looks as a white person dressed like a Watta than I do as a white person dressed as a white person. :-p When I left, the teachers at the school (who are from all over Kenya, and considered missionaries) were saying that they were so blessed and challenged by my willingness to become like the people and my bravery and faith for sleeping in the truck…which I had to laugh at because I only did it because I thought it would be interesting to learn how to tie the wrap like them, and I sleep in the truck because I’m a BAD missionary and not willing to suffer the heat of sleeping inside! :-P But that’s how God works I guess, making things that are just new and exciting and even completely selfish for me to be the same thing that just impresses people and makes them feel like I really value their culture. J

The clinic was SUUUUPER cool this week…there was this one little girl with a fungal skin infection that was like this gaping hole right outside her armpit, it looked like a deep cigarette burn but it was all dry, but there was a ½cm HOLE in her flesh. And an 8-year old girl walked 15km with her dad to get to the clinic because she had a burn from spilled boiling milk ok her leg, which was 5 days old. I graciously got permission to photograph it, so that’s on facebook for the non-squeamish. We debrided it and dressed it, then sent her home with some more supplies to change the dressing so they don’t have to walk the 15km again in 2 days. It’s a LONG walk! We walked 6km (each way) yesterday and it took over an hour (each way), and I have a big internal blister on one of my feet from too much walking. And this little girl did it with a huge burn on her leg.
I also started my first IV ever in a dehydrated woman…it’s much more complicated than just drawing blood…instead of just sticking any length of the needle into the vein you actually have to do it well enough to thread the plastic catheter in a little ways…eventually we got it to work. :-D And then later the lady had 13 girls, all within a couple years of each other age-wise, to visit..and she was ALL of their grandmother. That’s a LOT in a short time!
Did I mention that we don’t use a tourniquet? One hand squeezes the arm as the other hand puts in the needle. And did I mention that you can’t see the blue veins through Africans’ black skin? And that half the people needing injections are kids (aka small veins)? I’m gonna be such a good stick when I get back to the place with adequate lighting, tourniquets, and oh yeah, smaller than 20-gage needles in small children. :-D
And a kid dislocated his thumb, but popped it back in himself, and we jerry-rigged a splint out of a tongue depressor and gauze. Win. (that was for Thomas, who probably doesn’t even read this blog because my silly little brother can’t be bothered to miss me. :-P)
There was a kid who was so TERRIFIED of standing on the scale that we could NOT get him to stand up by himself or anything that would result in him being weighed. So we ended up weighing him plus mom holding him, then just mom (which was an issue because once she was on the scale he wouldn’t let GO of her…haha) and subtracting…eventually we got it to work. He weighed 15kg.

I hate doing laundry by hand.
I thought I hated doing laundry in machines, but that’s nothing compared to doing it by hand.
IT’s not the work, really…it’s that I don’t think I’m very good at it, so I don’t feel like my clothes actually get clean when I do it. I get really apathetic about it, and so I spend most of the time when I’m supposed t be scrubbing, or as Mom likes to say, “throwing those clothes against a rock” swirling them around in the basin pretending my hand is the agitator in a machine. :-P So I was very glad today when I got back to Nairobi to throw everything dirty AND everything clean that I already hand-washed into the Bass’ machine. :-D

On Tuesday I was on the phone with Emmy, and standing under a tree (with no leaves…ever) for the partial shade and a bird decided it would be cool to relieve itself on my skirt. Awesome.

I have heard a lot of donkey brays lately…and I keep wondering what someone who had never seen or heard a donkey before would think if he heard a donkey braying in the middle of nowhere. I would probably think some giant monstrosity of an animal had just a. lost its favorite child and b. was dying itself. The sound is so mournful and ….squeaky that it sounds like dying sad things. It always makes me laugh at the ridiculousness of the sound.

Anyway. So Saturday afternoon we made the 6km walk to the other school that only has 1^st and 2^nd grade, so that the younger kids who live closer to that place don’t have to walk so far….to visit the teachers there. We hung out and ate a ginormous amount of soup and this GIANT plate of plain spaghetti. And then I saw an impala on the walk home! But it ran behind bushes before I could get a picture. Theeeen since it was my last night, Isabella made me a cake and we had most of the people in the compound over to eat it and say bye. Then I woke up at 3:30AM to get in the car by 4:00 to drive in the pitch blackness through the bush to Garissa so someone else could catch a 5:00am bus and we could catch a 6:00 bus to Nairobi…which we did, and now I am HERE! And I had a giant fruit juice/smoothie thing that was a layer of beet rose juice (whatever that is) and a layer of avocado..juice and a layer of mango slushy juice…and it was basically the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted, since I haven’t had anything cold/juice/fruity in a long time. :-D

And the best thing about being home from Sombo is that on Wednesday, HEIDI INGRID JUDD is coming to Nairobi and then we are gonna get on a train together with two of her American vet friends and spend THIRTEEN HOURS on a train catching up on not having seen each other since July and getting to meet each other and being SO EXCITED! So that’s gonna be awesome. But for now it’s the simple pleasures of sleeping inside without dying from heat and drinking cold things and driving on paved roads and using washing machines and plugging my computer into the electricity source that isn’t going to go away when the sun goes down if there’s too much stuff plugged in. :-P

This is getting long so I’m gonna shut up now. Bye.