In which I get a song and a dance and a head cold

LIMURU IS COLD.
Ok. It’s not actually that cold, but compared to Nairobi/Naivasha…and even New York at this moment, it’s cold. Mornings are in the 50s, and it warms up in the afternoon so that we sit outside in the sun and are nice and toasty. But if it rains, it’s really cold. Like today. I didn’t go outside because the sun never broke through the clouds enough to make bringing my chair outside worth it.

I am loving my clinic experience here. Naomi is the doctor here. She’s quiet but she always explains what the patient is saying in Swahili to make sure I got everything (I am actually surprising myself with how much of what the patients say I’m able to understand) and then I go back into the pharmacy area with her and she explains which drugs she’s prescribing and why, and what other ones she could give in different circumstances, so it’s awesome. J
I got a mini-lesson on how to run the test for typhoid and what to look for in a blood smear to see if there’s malaria too. Now I’m just waiting for a positive malaria, which only happens 3-5 times/month, they said.
I’ve seen shingles, a couple of boils that didn’t need draining yet cuz they weren’t “ripened” (I don’t know if that’s the word we use in the US for that or not, but it seems really funny to me to call an abscess “ripe”…like a fruit) lots of upper respiratory tract infections, a couple minor wounds, a lady with shingles, some people trying to manage their high blood pressure…one lady came in today and she had the most BEAUTIFUL example of wheezing I’ve ever heard. We gave her an IV and then some hydrocortisone, which made the wheezing go away and turn into ronchi, so we gave aminosomething or other that I forget the name of, and sent her home with an inhaler. It would have been nice to give her nebulized albuterol, but unfortunately we don’t have a nebulizer.
I’m basically listening to everyone that comes in’s lungs with the stethoscope…even if they don’t have a cough, with the idea that the more “normal” you hear the better you get at hearing abnormal lung sounds. I’m always wondering whether I’m hearing lung noises or just crackling and clicking because the person’s shirt rubs against the scope, or my knuckles moving makes noise.

There are two Maasai guards here that patrol the compound at night and scare off intruders…mostly stray dogs who want to eat the rabbits and chickens. One of them, named Isaac, speaks English quite well and we’ve spent lots of time while waiting for dinner telling each other about our countries…mostly he asks me questions about the US…which is really interesting for me, because it’s interesting to see what things he wants to know, what things he’s heard, and also to try and answer questions like “why do you….” That I’ve never thought of myself. The other guard, Samuel, speaks Swahili and Maasai but doesn’t know how to read/write, so in the evenings and mornings I always find him with some of the boys, teaching him. He has a Maasai Bible that he’s usually reading when I come into the dining room for breakfast in the morning.
Yesterday Isaac and another friend of his, Also named Samuel, brought their Maasai traditional clothes and did a song and dance for me, which was pretty cool…the whole time I’m thinking “do they want me to give them money for this??” and at the end they pulled out a bag of bracelets and necklaces and what not, and I thought “aaah, here it is”. There were a couple of specific things I had been thinking of getting at the Maasai market anyway, so I bought a couple things from them, took some pictures and let them watch the video of the song/dance, so we were even. :-P

Most of the girls that live here are still on “holiday” so I have only met 2 of them, but I’ve enjoyed getting to know them so far, we’ve spent quite a bit of time talking. They’re in 8^th and 10^th grade, (Irene and Tracy or Jessie I haven’t figured it out yet) so the Tracy/Jessie will go back to boarding school on Tuesday (Monday is their labor day, so we’re apparently having a big feast…which means there will be chapati-making on Saturday, I’ve been told…so YEY) I’ve met 5 of the boys but so far have had the funniest time remembering which one is Andrew, John, Dennis, Sebastian, and Paul, because I can never look at their faces for more than 5 seconds before they’re running off to do something else. Dennis is funny, every time I see him he makes funny faces and starts dancing around…yesterday I was running outside, just back and forth across the yard because it was dark everywhere else, and he started making fun of me, running in circles. So we have had extremely minimal conversation but we’re friends, in a way. :-P

The food has been going really well. For lunch, all the people at the clinic get a big bowl of lunch, so far it’s been a rice-and-potatoes mixture every day.(There are 4 of us- Me, Naomi, Rachel (the lab tech) and Pastor Jonah (usually he handles the paying-for-the-medicine transaction, but anyone else could just as easily do it, it doesn’t use a whole lot of time, so I don’t know what else he does with his life, if he has some level of pastoral duties at the church?)We each just take how much we want and leave the rest, so I have full control over my lunch. For dinner, I have actually been eating the same things as the kids this time (there are enough of them that they don’t just cook a huge pot of beans and eat it for 5 days or until it runs out, they cook new dinner every night) and when I see how high my plate is piled, I say “oh, that is too much!” and I am allowed to take some out and divvy it up among a few other plates all gathered in the kitchen.

So that’s the good things…here are some bad things:
So remember that water heater that they were gonna fix? The first day the electricity was out in the morning, so they couldn’t test if they’d fixed it. Day two I woke up and it wasn’t working, so I just stuck my head in the freezing cold water to wet my hair and forgot about the rest of the shower. This is Africa, who needs to bathe every day? That afternoon there was electricity, so they fixed it. Day three I woke up and there was electricity but no water coming out of any faucet or shower head in the house. Apparently there’s a pump broken somewhere, and now, day 4, we still don’t have running water in the house, so I’m back to the bucket-of-heated-on-the-stove water. I have no problem with that, as I’m completely used to it by now, it’s just that I got all excited about the idea of a shower and now it’s gone for I-don’t-know-how-long.

Did I mention the smoke? The chimney of the wood stove which they cook over is clogged or something, so that whenever there is cooking, the whole house fills with smoke. I close the door to my room but I can smell it when I wake up in the morning anyways. During dinner cooking, I usually end up going outside It’s so bad. I am getting sick, it’s a cold like every single other cold I’ve ever gotten, making the usual progression of funny feeling in my throat, then post-nasal drip and runny nose , tomorrow the constant clearing my throat I’ve done today will be a cough, etc etc. So nothing terrible, but I’m 99% sure it’s a result of the irritation caused by breathing in all that smoke, despite my best efforts to breathe through my shirt. Oooooh well, if a cold and the cold (hare de har har) are the worst things I can think of to complain about I’ve got it pretty good. J

In which I apologize for neglecting you, and go to Limuru

I’ve been neglecting you! L It’s been a long time, I’m very sorry!

So while I’ve been absent from here, I finished up at Naivasha, spent Easter weekend in Nairobi with all the missionaries, and came to Limuru.
Clinic: there was a kid with a fungal infection in 2 fingernails, apparently he needs to be on the antifungal for three months! That’s a long time!
that day another kid came in with classic malaria symptoms…other things led the doctor to believe he might be HIV+. We had HIV tests but no malaria tests, so he took the kid to the back, we gave him an HIV test and told him it was a malaria test. The HIV was negative but we told him the malaria test was positive, and gave him anti-malarials.
I was laughing to think how this would NEVER go over in the US. You need specific consent to test for HIV, and to lie about test results is so illegal it’s not even funny. But this is Kenya. In the end, the patient was happy and the doctor was happy, so it worked out, however unethical it was.
We saw a 20-something guy with alopecia (hair loss) but it didn’t fit into any cause…it wasn’t a fungal infection because he’d been treated with antifungals and it didn’t grow back. The skin that was hairless looked perfect, not infected. But it was only in patches and only on his head, his eyebrows and eyelashes were still there, so he got another antifungal and left. Great, I’m sure that’ll help him…….

Have I told you about how I kill mosquitoes at night now? I wait until I hear the buzzing around my head, then I turn on the flashlight on my phone, and shine it at the wall. Mosquito comes to the light, and I kill it. Then I go back to sleep. It’s very nice knowing you’ve gotten all the mosquitoes out of the room. J

Friday morning I said my very sad good-byes to the girls, who had spent the night before enjoying the fact that when you comb my hair it gets all static with the comb. I left Naivasha and went back to Nairobi. I spent the day with the Basses and friends at the pool. Saturday all the missionary kids and a couple of the parents went ice skating at the only rink in Africa probably, except maybe in South Africa. It was square. It was a good time though, we were about 20 people and the vast majority of the people there, and we played keep-away with one of the kid’s hats. I had a lot of bruises after that but it was worth it for the fun. :-P
Sunday we went to church and had a big lunch, then went to one of the missionary’s houses for a giant egg hunt for the MKs. There were 22 eggs for each of 20 kids, hidden among 3 interconnected backyards, so it was a lot of fun for them. We hung out and talked and when I got back to the Bass house I spent 2 hours on the video chat with my family, who was gathered at my house for Easter. It was AWESOME to talk to them all for so long, I made them show me the food on their plates, thankful that for once I couldn’t smell the seafood salad, and even greeted some people as they came in, surprised to see me there. I sat on my Grandpa’s lap and chilled out on the table and just watched people wander in and out of the living room for a while, it was really good. J

Monday was a lazy day, I woke up on the couch because one of the dogs thought it’d be fun to pee on my bed in the evening, and by the time I went to bed and realized it, it was too late to do anything about it. WHY do I keep having to sleep on couches!? At least this one was really comfortable and long enough for my legs to be straight. :-P I made chocolate-covered strawberries with Anna, using frozen strawberries which was an adventure, but the chocolate solidified really fast! For dinner I MADE CALZONE and it was SO GOOD to taste that combination of smells and spices that is Italian food. There was no ricotta but we used mozzarella and pepperoni and it was delicious!

This morning we drove to Limuru. The elevation is about 8000ft and it’s gorgeous here. Everything is GREEN but it’s also kind of COLD. When the wind blows, if you’re not standing in the sun it’s too cold. So that’s unfortunate but this is supposed to be the busiest of the clinics so it will be good in that sense. I’m living in an orphanage that houses 7 girls and 9 boys, and they even have overhead showers with a WATER HEATER that was apparently broken but supposedly it’s been fixed today in honor of my coming. J There’s even a desktop computer with windows XP on it that the kids use to play games and listen to music. They’re currently playing a FIFA World Cup game on it. I didn’t even know you could play that on the computer?

The clinic is a converted 20-ft container. There’s a very small exam room with an exam table, a TINY pharmacy that is basically just a closet in the isthmus that leads to the very small lab room. But it’s busy, they say, and they have a lab technician, which is always good. The compound also has a farm, a couple greenhouses, and barn/stable/whatever you call them structures (not really even buildings) that house several cows, some chickens, and even some rabbits. I don’t know what they would do with rabbits other than eat them, so maybe I’ll try rabbit for the first time while I’m here! :-D

I have informed the caretaker, I don’t know her actual name but she goes by “Mama Alice” (it’s quite common to call a woman “Mama *insert name of first born child here*”) that I don’t eat a lot and I don’t want any special treatment. We’ll see how that goes, because I’ve just been served a thermos of tea, and I don’t think the kids have had any. :-P BUT she did let me stand right there and say “that’s good” when she was serving lunch to me. I surprised her by saying that I was perfectly fine eating rice and ugali and sukumawiki (big leafy vegetable) just like them, so I may or may not get special dinner, depending on if she listens to me. Of course I’ll keep you updated about THAT.

I’m currently sharing a room with one other bed…there’s a girl who will be here but the schools are still closed for vacation here and she’s not back from visiting family.
I spent the per-lunch afternoon hanging around the house talking to some of the kids and people who work around, dispelling the myth that in the US it’s required that you have 3 jobs (what!?) and helping throw out the rotten kernels of maize from a weevil-infested bag that had gotten wet and was being spread out in the sun to dry and make the weevils leave.
It’s getting dark, so I turned on the light in my room to see better…it’s about 5 watts. Even after it had time to warm up. So I turned it off because the only time it would be helpful is in PITCH black, maybe I could avoid bumping into the other bed and find the door, but that’s about it. Note to self: do everything that requires seeing before the sun goes down. Got it.

Okay well I’m gonna go out into the hall and try and make friends with some kids! I promise the next blog post will be much less than one week away!

Pictures are up on Facebook, even if you don't have facebook you should be able to see it by clicking on this link:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/fbx/?set=a.971909453505.2523324.428882&l=5f33e43b44

In which I learn that I know someone FAMOUS, and a cow steps on my toe. Also a list of foods i wish I had.

The Kenya Assemblies of God has this calendar it distributes en masse to its churches and apparently all its members, because I've seen it everywhere. Apparently calendars are considered essential and beautiful wall decorations, because everyone has at least one and many people have 3 or 4. Some are multiples of the current year from various organizations, and often there’s a couple from the last few years residually hanging there. I only just looked at it for April, (or, paid attention to it…) and I thought I recognized one of the people in one of them…the way he was standing was familiar. So I took a closer look and what do you know, there’s Pastor Gregg, giving a leadership award to the KAG General Superintendent Peter Njiri and his wife! Ha! So that was exciting to me, I felt like I had just made some huge connection between Kenya and home, like I'm not in an entiiiirely foreign place, since these people have heard of Pastor Gregg! Haha. So my pastor from home is displayed in the office and/or home of almost every member of the KAG until June, since they put 3 months/page. I told Nancy and she just thought it was the coolest thing ever too. J

Saturday, a 3-week old cow stepped on my toe. Despite being only 3 weeks old, its shoulder reaches my waist and it has hooves. Which are painful when they step on you. There's no padding on their feet like if a big dog stepped on you. It was of course an accident, and I was wearing flipflops, and now I have a cut on my toe where the nail meets the skin, but that’s all. But it was a good experience to say I've had, I guess. :-P

Also, I have a open cut on my foot from scratching too much, an old bite…I was using my heel of one foot to rub the top of the other foot and I ended up taking off a layer of skin, like a blister. This morning it looked funny so I put some Neosporin on it. This afternoon I realized the Neosporin I have with me expired in get this- 1999. Either that, or the 99^th day of March in an unknown year, or the 99^th month in the year 2003…but my best guess is march 1999. I wonder if it will me any good or I shouldn’t bother? It’s lost its consistency and is sort of liquidy now.

This morning in the clinic, I left to “take tea” like I’m supposed to do at 10am…even though I’m not thirsty or hungry yet…but you gotta choose your battles, and I’d rather have morning tea and small dinner than eat giant helpings for dinner and no tea in the afternoon. Anyway, I came back to the clinic and heard a kid screaming for her life. I came in the back door and this 3 year old girl was standing in the hallway outside the exam room door, screaming. The moment she saw me she visibly jumped and then started screaming even louder, then ran back into the exam room and threw herself at her mom. At first I thought my surprise entrance and then whiteness was what scared her, but I found out a little later that the doctor had (knowing I was coming back very soon) told her someone was going to come and give her an injection if she tried to run away, and she thought that’s what I was going to do. So I stood outside the door, out of sight for a few minutes until she calmed down, then when I found out why she was scared of me I went in and showed her I wasn’t holding any needles. By the end of the visit she had shaken my hand- twice…once with a very large amount of drool on it from playing with her gum (I immediately washed my hands, Sue! :-P) and when she left she waved and said “bye!”
Little kids are always so happy when they leave a doctor’s office. Once the possibility of getting a shot is gone, they really let go of all their anxiety.

Saturday was an interesting day. I went to the pastor’s house with Nancy, they were having a loooot of guests over (the many children and grandchildren of the pastor’s wife’s brother, who died about a month ago) and wanted her to help cook for them all. Around lunch time I joined them. I was given lunch and watched the women cook, took a video of them making chapati, and helped them bring all the food out into the living room for the guests (which caused a little spectacle, because none of them expected a mzungu to come out carrying a tray full of chapati) I’d already eaten so I just sat with them while they ate and watched a video of clips from the funeral. Then they brought out two big trays of half-bananas for everyone…except I got handed a bowl with 3. I took one and put the bowl on the table, but was told “those are yours” I said “All of them?” (yes) “I don’t need three, everyone else is eating only 1!” and left it there, so others ate it. Then I helped them bring this 5-gallon bucket full of extra mugs down for tea, and was given the job of wiping them all off so they could be used. During that time they were cutting up watermelon in the kitchen. Everyone on the kitchen was grabbing a piece as they wanted it. The watermelon were brought out on big trays to the people in the living room. I was given a plate with a piece cut in half for me. Instead of waiting for me to finish the mugs they put the plate right next to me where I was sitting…on the floor. I laughed. I was allowed to help clear the used mugs off the living room table, but not to wash anything.
So the day was a really weird mix of being treated like someone who lived there and was allowed to help, and someone who was even more of a guest than the guests were. So that was kind of frustrating…once again, I hate being treated special. I don’t sitting around doing nothing when there’s stuff to do(thanks Mom for that gene), especially with people I don’t know who are speaking a language I know exactly one word in, while the people I sort of know are doing the something I want to help with.
I’ve never liked washing dishes so much as when I do it for the first time after 2.5 weeks of not being allowed to. The lure of the forbidden I guess. Cuz at home I would rather do most things than wash dishes. (but not laundry. Though after this trip, the availability of a machine might make me appreciate it enough to not mind laundry)

At one point I went to visit a friend with a couple of the girls, when we got back I heard singing coming from the living room…everyone was gathered around the coffee table holding a couple of coffee mugs or a box of them, and singing in Kikuyu. I poked my head in to see what was going on, and got dragged into the group. The relatives had bought a giant set of mugs, and the singing was some sort of “thank you we accept the gift, hooray for the blessings of God” song. Theeeen someone brought a goat, so we all went outside to take pictures of it. For some reason the pastor wanted a picture of me and the goat, so we did that, even though I had nothing to do with the goat. Then I took a picture of the whole family with the goat. I took 2, just to be sure, then I said “okay, everyone make a funny face!” because that’s what you do in the US at the end of a group picture, ya know? Well they don’t do that usually here, so they all looked at me kind of confused-ly, so I demonstrated “make a face like thiiiis or stand funny like thiiiis, or something funny!” So they all laughed and a few of them did it. Later I was told that everyone thought that was really funny, and an 8-year old kid told his dad he wanted to marry an American.
I am THAT funny. Baaaahahahahaha.

Also, next week my cousins from Ohio are going to visit my family in New York. If it were possible to put into words how jealous I am of my NY family, or even the Ohio family because I want to see the NY people too, I would do it. Or how much I wish I could just teleport on home for the week to hang out with them and come back. Ma non è possibile.

I’ve decided to keep a list of foods I’ve had a sudden giant craving for since I’ve been here. Some have come and gone, others have stayed with me for a long time, some are constantly poking at the back of my head. Here’s what I’ve wanted, randomly, in the past 3 months:

• Wendy’s Chicken nuggets (all the time)
  
• Honey barbecue boneless wings (frequently)
• Vanilla frosted dunkin donuts doughnut (evey time I see coffee and think of dunkin donuts)
• Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies (after every meal)
• Entenmann’s vanilla doughnuts with chocolate shell (only got this one yesterday, we’ll see how it turns out)
• graham crackers (only once, since I drank tea that had something in it that made it taste like a graham cracker)
• Cheese. Preferably mozzarella (frequently)
• Pizza. I’ve had pizza….but just not any good ones (whenever I eat a bad pizza, or sometimes when I want something that doesn’t seem 100% like dinner, for lunch…since there’s no distinction between the kinds of foods they eat for dinner vs lunch here, the way we reserve “light” things and sandwiches for lunch in the US, and pizza counts as a “light” lunch because you just go get a slice and it doesn’t require any cooking. :-P )
• Steak (or any larger-than-bite-size piece of non-overcooked (aka actin denatured by myosin still intact) cow meat (every time I eat meat, or realize I haven’t eaten meat in 2 weeks)

I would ask you to mail me some, but most of those are quite perishable and the rest probably would get stolen in the mail because thats what happens when you send things to Kenya from the US. ("There MUST be something good inside, lets steal it!!") So just please have all of these things ready for me to consume as soon as I step out of the baggage claim area, and I'll be very grateful. But first I want a giant hug from everyone in my family and several other people. And if Thomas doesn't want to squeeze me back I will use the giant knife I'm going to buy him to threaten his life. :-p

In which I conquer bedbugs, tell a bazillion stories, and take an HIV test just for fun.

I am writing this blog post in hopes that the internet will decide to work again. Every time I try to connect, it say the remote computer did not respond. So I called customer service but the first time it hung up on me as soon as I pressed 2 to speak to a person about my problem, and then after that the said “your estimated wait time is less than one minute, we appreciate your patience” but it wasn’t like “less than one minute” was filled in…like that’s the message they always play. Because after listening to this weird dialogue where a man pretends to “download his feelings as an attachment” for his girlfriend, who giggles and says “oh, baby!” when he says “You’re like google, you give me all the answers”….ad infinitum, it hung up on me. So I called back a third time, and it happened again. I don’t have enough minutes left on my phone to deal with this right now so I’m just gonna have to wait it out. It might be a problem with the cell towers…one of the major phone companies changed ownership a few months ago and I think just now officially changed their service. I got a text message today asking me turn my phone off and back on to get Airtell service instead of Zain, the old name. So hopefully it’s just a glitch cuz of that and it will fix itself. BUT my internet isn’t Airtell…so it shouldn’t be affected by that? Maybe they use each other’s towers. I don’t know, but I want it to start working, please.

Here’s a smattering of funny stories and not-funny-but-informative happenings, and interesting things in the clinic over the past few days:

There was a 8-ish year old girl who came in with burns on the back of her calves, apparently she backed into the exhaust pipe of something and burned herself pretty bad on the left leg and only blisters on the right leg. So I cleaned it and dressed it (use number 2 for those 300 rolls of self-adhesive bandage!) and was very happy to see some blood and some dermis. She came back today for a dressing change, and I didn’t bother with the right leg because the blisters went down without breaking open, so it’s just closed. The goopy scab had come off the little 1.5x1in rectangle on the other leg, and it was beautifully pink under there, so I just redid the silver sulfadiazine (one of my favorite words to say) and ta da.

Today a man came in with flank/ureter/urethra pain, so despite not having a lab tech, apparently we DO have a microscope. So examination of his urineàgonorrhea puscles. It took him a while but he eventually admitted he was cheating on his wife. (you get what you deserve, says I!) So he got a shot in the butt, a very painful one (you get what you deserve!) and an HIV test, which was negative ( I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, even one who was cheating…maybe the scare is enough??) So I learned how the little test strips work, and Edwin asked me if I wanted to do one on myself. Well I am of course 100% sure it’s gonna be negative, so I was like “what the heck” so of course it was negative.

There was a kid yesterday who had had measles and when he came in he had lots of swollen glands in the upper body, you could see the ones bulging out under his jaw, and feel them in his armpits, so that was cool.

If you’ve seen the pictures on Facebook, you can see that the girls, who previously all had their hair in braids, took them out on Saturday. I was coming home from the wedding and saw them all sitting outside undoing each other’s hair with thorns from the bush behind them. One of them had a half-fro, one had just the sides in a fro (she reminded me of a clown with that hairdo), and I was laughing at them a looooot, so I took some pictures.

Sunday after church I helped chop the wood for the stove fire for dinner, in flipflops, in a long skirt. Chopping wood was not new for me, but the attire certainly was. It was fun though, cuz the ax was BLUNT worse than the non-sharpened side of a knife blade (there’s a name for it, I forget…) and there were lots of nails in the wood preventing it from splitting the way we wanted it to. Oooh well, we got wood, and we cooked, and we ate, so all was well. :

I had ANOTHER conversation about my amount of food the other day…I was allowed to serve myself my lunch one day and Nancy was surprised how small it was. I tried to explain to her that I’m not used to eating such large portions, even if they don’t seem large to her, and I don’t want to eat more than I need, it’s not healthy (plus, a GIANT spoonful of margarine goes into basically everything they cook…). So she told me (for the 15^th time, though usually in different contexts) “when in Rome, do as the Romans” and I said that if the Romans were doing something unhealthy for me, I shouldn’t do it, no matter how much the Romans wanted me to. So I think she quickly got over the little offence I thought might be brewing up, because after I finished eating and thanked her for lunch and told her it was very good “even though I eat small amounts”, she said “no, it’s ok, it’s not small”. So I guess she came to terms with it. J
I have served myself at every meal since. I think the girls being away has somehow released Nancy to let me help her in the kitchen…2 nights ago she told me to come in and watch her make my dinner, and last night she wanted me to do it (though I don’t think she trusts me with a knife yet…you know I HAVE cooked before, just not Kenyan food! I know how to DO everything, I just don’t know what to do, haha. Oooh well..I guess if I let them think I don’t know what I’m doing at all I can use it as an excuse when I don’t do it the right way according to them) but I was on the phone with the director of one of the masters programs so I couldn’t. Then after lunch today I brought the dishes into the kitchen as I’ve been doing for a while, and asked if I could wash them. She said “it’s not required” so I said “ok, it’s not required, but is it allowed?” she just looked at me, so I washed the dishes. VICTORY!! This is definitely a result of the girls being away, because usually she tells me to just let them do it, since they have assigned nights for dish duty. BUT she let me instead of insisting she do it. PROGRESS.

It seems I have had final victory over the bed bugs…last night I slept through the WHOLE night and I didn’t have ANY new bites on me when I woke up!
Every now and then one of the old bites starts to itch and I get scared it’s a new one, but then I see it’s already got a scab from scratching, or I know I already had one there and it’s ok.

Four of the 5 girls went home yesterday afternoon, to visit grandparents and aunts and such, so it’s been veeeery quiet around here since then. One of them just came back, though without her sister, so I don’t know what’s going on there but it’s still pretty silent…mostly because Alice is the loud one and she’s still gone. :-P

Oh! Yesterday was April 12, which is the exact halfway point of this trip. It’s crazy to think it’s almost over…I can’t say it feels like I just got here, or that it feels like I’ve been here forever…it fees just about like I’ve been here for 3 months. :-P And so I have 3 months to go! It’s exciting to think I have only had half of the experiences I’m going to have, so far…and the (large, of course) part of me that misses home likes the thought that each day I’m closer to being home again than I am to when I left home. J

I video chatted with my mom the other day and the girls were there and crowded around me and the laptop, as they do every time I open it, no matter what I’m doing…I could sit there and just stare at my desktop for 10 minutes and they would do it right along with me, just as interested as if I was showing them pictures of themselves. Anyway, they loooved talking to her, fascinated by the video thing and the fact that they could see themselves in the little window in the corner. Faith kept yelling “HOW ARE YOU?” at her, and I tried to explain several times that you didn’t need to scream, but she kept doing it…like she was trying to make her voice reach the US instead of go through the internet. SO mom got a tour of the house, and the girls got a tour of my house, and I got to see the new bedspreads Emmy got….I don’t know what was in her head when she got bright PINK comforters, but at least the reverse side is bright ORANGE, my FAVORITE color…though she has the pink side showing on my bed. I’ll fix that when I get home.

So far I’ve started applying/almost finished applying to two masters programs, both with “do well and you get a guaranteed interview at our school” incentives…I was in the middle of looking up more and seeing how to apply when the internet decided to stop working, so I’ll get on that as soon as it lets me.

I spent the entire evening last night until 12:30, and then literally ALL day at the clinic today, from 9-5 with a few short interruptions for lunch and 3 or 4 patients that came in, writing emails and researching these programs. I have a problem where once I get an idea in my head I absolutely CANNOT rest or think of anything else, unless it’s really interesting, for long until I have satisfied myself that I know everything I can about whatever new thing I’ve discovered. So.

Today I was too tired to get out of bed at 7, so when I got home from the clinic I had the best workout ever in the extra mattress room…did you know if you do the non-aerobic stuff first it makes the aerobic stuff like 40x better!? The trainer on the cruise told this to my dad, and I did that today and I was jogging laps in the room for a good 30 minutes and felt fine and breathing heavy, but not gasping for breath, despite my heart rate being no lie 176 (88x2 = 176 RIGHT!)…as I usually am after like 2 minutes of jogging. I only stopped because I didn’t feel like running back and forth anymore, and my feet were hurting cuz that’s the first time I’ve put on sneakers for more than 5 minutes in…like 2 months.

Ok that’s all. I hope the internet works by now.

In which I become a bed bug chew toy, and make a much-awaited-but-not-like-you-thought announcement

First things first: Actually…that will come at the end. Fun things first:
When the girls decided to do my laundry for me, they also decided to make my bed for me. So they took the sheets off so they could put them back on really nice, I guess, since they were on loosely because I have twin size sheets on a single size bed. It has never bothered me. Then again I don’t iron them before I put them on the bed either, as they do. But apparently during this process a bug was found. And when it was squished it had blood in it. Yes, there were bedbugs. BUT. There were two mattresses. The top one had been on the bed, the bottom one I added from a room of spare mattresses, apparently I picked a bad one because this one is the cause of the 3-ish new bites I’ve ended up with each morning. I always thought it was just mosquitoes because it’s always been on exposed areas like my arms and feet, which are sticking out of the sheets. So once again they laughed at me and we got rid of the bad mattress and replaced it with one that had been sunned enough to make bugs go away the other day. If only that was the end of the story. That night, I went to sleep on the couch about an hour into trying to fall asleep because I was SO itchy. Part of it was my head, I’m sure...but I also had some new bites in the morning. So all the mattresses from that room were taken out, and everyone in there went into a different bed in a different room, with a different mattress. Problem solved, right? No. the next morning I woke up with more bites. That night I couldn’t fall asleep because of the itching, oh yeah, and I found 2 bed bugs crawling around..one not on the bed, one under my sheets. So I went to sleep on the couch, and resolved to boil my sheets and pillow and pajamas to kill any possible bugs that may have been left. So I did. Also, the rooms and beds and basically the whole house were sprayed with pesticides. That night, I found another bug crawling around. And interrupted one in the middle of biting my arm. While I was still AWAKE. So…I went to sleep on the couch again. This morning we took the mattress and the bed out of the room and put them and my sheets in the sun, and sprayed this room again. Hopefully all this, along with my fervent prayers, will prevent any further bites. It’s not typical bed bug bite though…it’s just a lot of them on my feet and hands, with a few on my arms and calves, and one on my side. They supposedly typically bite in clusters on the torso, but mine are all single, random ones on the extremities. I’d doubt it was bed bugs if I hadn’t seen and killed several of them that look exactly like they’re supposed to.

On a lighter note, I went to my first Kenyan wedding on Saturday. It started at 10:30, so naturally we started our 1.5 hour trip at 11:00. Somehow we managed to miss very little of the ceremony. When we arrived the groom’s mom was in the middle of a very, very long speech (doubled in length by the translation from Swahili to English). Followed by an extremely detailed account of the groom’s life’s important moments, the bride’s life’s important moments, and the important moments in their relationship, including the exact date which they got their government-mandated-before-you-get-married HIV test. Then there was a quite good and quite funny sermon from the pastor, as well as a “I’m only going to talk for 1 minute because we’re running out of time” “greeting” by his wife, which turned into another very long yet also very good and very funny sermon. FINALLY we got to the vows, which would have been very traditional what-you’d-expect-at-an-American-wedding except that the pastor, being funny like he is, was ad libbing and adding a lot of stuff in…making them say “I love you, you know I love you, I love you” 5 or 6 times in the middle, etc. Also, the putting-on of the rings isn’t a “just slip it on their finger” like we do, they veeeery slowly work it down the finger so there’s lots of time for pictures and video. James started singing this song as he was doing it “you are important to me, I need you to survive”, it was quite adorable. So theeeeen they signed the license, had communion, and were announced to the crowd. Hooray! THEN literally every pastor in attendance (there were several) was asked to stand up and greet everyone, some elderly women that James often treats were brought up to say how wonderful of a person he is, etc etc etc. It was just hysterical to me how everyone who began speaking mentioned being quick because we were in a rush to be out of there on time, but they forgot about that as soon as they got into what they were saying. SO it was QUITE a long ceremony, but eventually we made it to the reception, a group of tents on the grounds of a school in Nairobi. There was a special tent for the pastors to sit at, where they were served food instead of standing on the line and bringing it back to their chairs like the rest of the guests. Lucky for me I was travelling with a pastor so I got to it in the special people section…though I got up to get my own plate anyways, because I had a special request to NOT eat my weight in rice/potatoes/beans. :-D

There are many other fun, funny, interesting things from this week but it’s getting LATE and I need to get to this, so the rest of the fun stuff will come soon.

Ready!? You’re not going to like this news.

I mean, really, really not gonna like it.

Unless you’re sadistic, or you know God’s inner thoughts, that is.

I’m serious. It’s bad.

Do you know what it is yet?

You probably do.

Yes, that.

The unimaginable.

It’s happened.

(Drumroll)


I didn’t get into Buffalo either.

Initial reaction? “I knew it, I’ve been dreading it all day, for some reason”. In the afternoon, I just felt this strong compulsion to pray for my one last application. I fought the urge to pray for an acceptance in favor of praying for God’s will to happen, whatever it was, and to give me the strength to be OK with it. SO when I got a cell phone call from my mom, I knew what it was gonna say, since she doesn’t call unless it’s important. There’s an online application status check that she’d been religiously checking, and it said “non-accepted”. You know…I still haven’t gotten an email from them saying so though.

Anyway. So I was, obviously, and still am, quite, quite, QUITE disappointed…This is something I’ve been looking forward to and EXPECTING for a long time. Not just because I hate the idea of rejection/failure/TELLING EVERYONE I’VE EVER MET ABOUT SAID REJECTION/FAILURE(!!!!!) but because I was really EXCITED about going! I miss the college atmosphere, I miss my life having a weekly schedule, I even miss STUDYING and TAKING NOTES, and I was so excited to get to learn all that stuff I’ve been wanting to learn for forever! And then to have that just drop out of possibility for another year…I’ve never in my ENTIRE life spent a moment where I didn’t know what the next step was. I always had a perfect plan of what I was going to do for the next year, next 4 years, next 12 years…and there I was left with NO CLUE what to do until I could re-apply, since of COURSE I’m going to re-apply.

So for a couple days I’ve been becoming OK with the idea, and asking God to show me what on earth else I’m supposed to do with my time. I’ve considered several different things, and then today I spoke with Buffalo’s admissions director to ask for advice on what I should do to improve my application. He said my extracurriculars and being in Africa and patient experience are great, but my grades could use a boost (Seriously…I TOLD you people I didn’t do as well as I wanted to in college and I could tell by some people’s faces they thought I was playing it down. But I was serious. Physics, Orgo, chem…..they were not kind to my GPA. Unfortunately Bio classes weren’t the only sciences I had to take or I would have been golden). So he had this suggestion that I have spent the literally last 7 hours researching and thinking it’s a brilliant idea- a masters!
Because if I do a more advanced degree, in science, and do well (and if I get a masters in a bio-related (aka not physics) science, that will make my grades much happier, to go with my apparently “impressive” MCAT score. And you will NEVER know what any of those numbers actually are, so guess all you want, you can stick bamboo shoots under my fingernails if you want, I’ll just tell you a lie. :-P
Anyway, so I spent the whole 7 hours, like I said, looking into programs and I didn’t even know they existed before today but it turns out there are many one-year programs (some masters, some post-bacc) that are made for people about-to-go-to-med-school who want to strengthen their application or just get a masters first, or other ones for people who decided to be premed at the last minute and need to get the prerequisites in. Mom and I have talked to several people on the phone today, who seem to be impressed with my grades-as-told-by-Jayne (let’s hope she had the numbers right :-P) and think I’ll for sure get into those programs.
So if THIS works out, I will get to take some pretty AWESOME sounding classes, including a few that are the same classes the first year med students are taking at that same institution, some biochem (love), cell bio(wahoo!), histology (almost better than ice cream) and the love of my life, anatomy (as in, with a real-live (I mean, dead) cadaver.
And then when I get to med school I’ll be smarter than everyone else cuz I went to Africa AND took a bunch of extra graduate-level biology courses. :-P
They start at the end of August and miraculously have application deadlines in May or June or even July. Probably because they attract the “I’m-a-failure-at-life-and-didn’t-get-in-to-med-school” crowd. :-P

So that is the current state of things. It sort of is really, really terrible, because the goal of my entire life up to this point has been GET IN TO MEDICAL SCHOOL…and then I didn’t do that. But I’m making the best of it I guess, finding the silver lining and what not, trying not to think about what I don’t want to think about, etc etc.

So here’s what you can ALL do for me, as a favor.
If there is even an ounce of feeling sorry for me in your whole brain, throw it away. Or at least don’t let me see it. :-P I hate feeling pitied more than anything in the world almost, so DON’T DO IT. Just accept it and move on with life, like ME!

Also, I joke about what a huge disappointment I am to myself and the world at large, etc etc, but I’m really okay. I had spent a lot of time bracing myself for this moment, and learning how to be OK with it and trust that God STILL knows what he’s doing whether I get it or not. Every step of the way something new happens and I, silly little human, ASSUME I know where he’s going from there (AKA, “there must be a reason He wants me in Buffalo!”) , and there’s another bend in the road I didn’t see coming. Anyway.

Sorry that was so long…in case you hadn’t noticed these blog posts are entirely just a stream of consciousness, with little-to-no proofreading and far-too-many dashes. I don’t know if I repeat myself or jump around or what, but you’re getting a very uncharacteristic look into my brain. Feel privileged.

Well the bugs have been eating me out of sleep the past few nights, and it’s past midnight and I’m waking up at 7, so I’m going to bed now. Good night, sleep tight, and PRAY FOR ME that the bedbugs don’t bite!

In which I set right some misconceptions and have my attempt at doing laundry thwarted

OK…so the first half of this post was supposed to go on the last one but it was too long. So we’re going back almost a week first.
Sunday…was an ADVENTURE. Church starts at 8 (read: 8:30) so we did English service until 10(read: 10:30) (which involved me getting up in front of the 50 people to introduce myself) then Bible study by age group until 11 (read: 11:45), (which involved me getting up in front of another 50 people to introduce myself…see more people had come by then) and then Swahili service (which involved me getting up in front of 300 people to introduce myself…as well as lots of semi-choreographed dancing…at one point everyone was supposed to be twirling their handkerchiefs in the air and I didn’t have one so I was just standing there but the lady on my left was twirling the half of her shawl that was over her shoulder and I narrowly missed getting poked in the eye 39 times by the tassels on the end of it ) until about 1:30. Then we came home and had lunch and headed out to Evening service at 3 (read: we left the house at 3:30) So when we got there it was starting to drizzle. It was at someone’s house, because the woman’s father had died recently, and the tradition is to have a church gathering at their house to comfort the family (If someone I loved had just died, I would not want 100 people in my house that week, but I guess it would be nice to have lots of people there to take your mind off things…I’d just rather it not be in my house where I had to clean or cook for all these people. But I don’t think anyone cooked or cleaned for us because it was outside and I didn’t see any food.) Anyway, it was outside and there was a series of tarps over half the chairs they’d set up. They had finished worship and started preaching when we got there, and he was just finishing as the rain got bad. Everyone with umbrellas ran home and everyone else crowded under the awning of the house or the tarps. That wasn’t much good because there were lots of holes in and between the tarps, which resulted in not only getting rained on, but getting poured a stream of all the water that was collecting on the tarps. Oops. So eventually someone from the church who lived 20 ft. away invited Nancy and I into his house so we went there to wait out the storm. Once it stopped we walked home.

Monday, we went to someone eeeelse’s house for a Bible study. When we got there a half hour after it started they were just finishing up worship, which was in Kikuyu, and involved beating animal hide drums with short wooden sticks. It felt like Africa! :-P
So there were about 20 people crammed into a room not much bigger than a large American bathroom, so it was noticeably 10 degrees warmer inside than outside. I was asked, once again, to get up and introduce myself even though I was sure all those people had heard my by then. I’d decided that if I had to do it again I would try out my Swahili so I told them my name and I’m from NY and I’m in Kenya for 6 months and I want to be a doctor and work in Kenya, etc. and apparently they were highly impressed by me knowing Swahili…. Now I’m 100% positive they weren’t impressed WITH my Swahili…because it even sounded bad to ME, but they could have been impressed by my at knowing enough Swahili to get my point across, which I think is what they were. :-P

People are STILL having issues with my name…I’ve given up saying “Danielle” because they always think it’s “Daniel” and I can see the confused look on their faces until I say “it’s LIKE ‘Daniel’, but with ‘l-e’ on the end” and then they say “ooh…” but still don’t really know how they should pronounce it. So now I say “Daniela” which is how they usually end up pronouncing it anyways, but they still don’t really like that. They often ask for my other name, like “maybe this one will be better” and everyone likes “Elizabeth” better, it doesn’t seem that much easier to say than “Danielle” or “Daniela” but some people have decided they will call me that.

Also, I discovered that many people think my hair is a weave. I had a hard time convincing someone the other day that it was my real hair, it grows out of my head, and wazungu don’t wear weaves…they wouldn’t stay, our hair doesn’t stay in braids, and we shampoo it every day or every couple days depending on the person. Shock ensued. :-P Alice keeps telling me she wants my hair instead of hers…she refers to her hair as a bush, and mine as velvet. Haha!

So..you know how I am almost never sitting the right way in a chair? More often than not I have at least one of my legs or feet under me and I’m curled up in some strange way. You’d think a skirt would limit that but I have found many ways to tuck this here and that there so that I can still sit however I want and maintain decency. So I have never thought anything of it, but apparently NOBODY in Kenya sits or has ever sat like that. I learned this today when I was informed that someone asked Nancy if I had legs. She had never seen anyone sit like that, and she saw me on a chair with my legs up under me. I laughed out loud when she told me that one.

Today I attempted to wash my clothes. I KNEW the girls were going to laugh at me when I did it, because I don’t really know what I’m doing so I just make something up. So they were all going to wash a car somewhere so I took the opportunity to go wash my clothes. There’s this trough outside with a few faucets on it. So I’m halfway done with the first batch and one of the girls comes out and I told her not to watch me because I didn’t want them to make fun of me. She laughed but went away. Then 2 more come out and I told them not to watch me either, but they decided they were going to help. 3 minutes later, the 5 of them had completely taken over washing my clothes and I was standing there with NOTHING to do. They literally shoved me out of the way and started washing and ringing out my clothes. I would have thought I would have liked that because in general I don’t like doing it but I’d watched them washing enough in the past 2 weeks (they wash their uniforms every night) that I had a much better idea of what I was doing and I thought it was going well. Plus their idea of “getting all the soap out” is dipping a shirt in the water you just used to de-soap 5 other shirts like 2 or 3 times and then wringing it out. And I’m like noooo there’s still soap in there!
Also, before the complete takeover had happened I was still trying, when one of the girls tried to correct my technique. She kept saying “like this” and I kept getting it wrong. Then I realized there was nothing special about the way she was scrubbing the clothes..the point is to rub two parts of the cloth together…why does it matter how you’re holding it? The oldest girl, and Nancy when I told her later, agreed, but the rest of them couldn’t fathom how I could do it any other way. Oh well. I guess I’ll be resigned to being laughed at, because I still don’t really get how she was trying to show me to hold the clothes…:-P

Last night I got my first official ugali-making lesson though I’ve seen it a billion times before. It took me a few tries to get the lump of goo to stay together as I was trying to flip it over to cook the other side, but eventually I got it…of course with lots of laughs from Rachel.

Tomorrow I am going to Nairobi for my first Kenyan wedding (though they said it’s going to be relatively western in style ) so I’m sure I’ll have lots of commentary about that when it’s over. I am traveling with the pastor of the church here, who is also going to the wedding…but I don’t know what time he’s planning on leaving. I asked him this morning and he didn’t know, and I’ve not seen him since. So it’s supposed to start at 10:30 in a city 1.5 hours away so..maybe I’ll wake up at 10? :-P

In which I finally get some patients, then feel bad for them...and learn how to shred cabbage like a Kenyan

Helloooo again!
This week has been quite good. First the updates:

Sunday night I had a very wonderful conversation about FOOD with Nancy, saying I couldn’t handle eating such giant helpings and so many snacks every day, very much emphasizing that it was because I wasn’t used to it and my stomach didn’t like it and also that it was WONDERFUL food (it has honestly been the best cooking I’ve had so far…Nancy has a gift!) And she was wonderful about it. She said she didn’t want me to be uncomfortable or wishing the month was over faster and she was glad that I told her and it’s just that the way sheeeee was brought up, you put ALL the food you can FIT onto someone’s plate, and they can then ask for another plate to take some out into, or put it back into the serving bowl, etc, and it’s only refusing the food (THE cardinal sin) or not finishing your plate that’s a problem. So in the future I should just ask her for less and she will take some away, or now that I’ve been here a little she’s ok with the idea of me *gasp* coming into the kitchen to say “when”. Now…that idea seems completely absurd to me…why would you give someone food just so they could put it back? Why not just put the pot on the table and let someone have whatever amount they want in the first place, while still able to see there’s more in case they want it…but that’s what happened when people are raised on 2 different continents. So things have been going much better on that front, though everyone else I’ve eaten in front of has been shocked how little I eat. I’ve also started waking up when my alarm goes off as opposed to a full 30 minutes after, and pulling an extra, thin mattress off one of the empty beds and working out for a half hour, so I just feel better about my life.

Also, as I’m writing this, the song “Wasn’t Me”, by Shaggy, just came on the radio. That song was really popular during gymnastics practice in like 8^th grade. Haha.
Anyway.

This week the clinic has been WONDERFULLY behaved..we have had between 6 and 10 patients each day instead of between 1 and 3…so that’s awesome. I’ve seen mumps for the first time, an ankle sprain that we sent for an x-ray that came back negative, plenty of the usual coughs, a young mother worried that the whites of her baby’s eyes weren’t as white as the other kids, who we assured was juuuust fine, they didn’t look abnormal at all to us, and it wasn’t like they were darker than they used to be. There was a woman who had a giant swollen ankle from a thorn prick, but the swelling was centered about an inch and a half below the prick. She got antibiotics. Does the thorn prick result in a bacterial infection that leads to ankle swelling!? I don’t think so, but if not, the antibiotics are useless/just creating a superbug. But that’s what they got in Sombo too. I guess I should ask someone instead of just pondering.

The best/worst patient though was this 106 year old woman. Yes. One hundred and six. Let me tell you her story. She had 5 kids. 4 of them died, and the 5^th is a drunkard and doesn’t take care of her. She lives FAR away, like up a mountain, so she walked quite far to get here, and to get to church on Sundays. The church is helping her out a lot, which is good. But. She’s been having a hard time breathing and a bad cough. We listen to her lungs and I thought there was something wrong with me but both Edwin and I heard it…NO breath sounds in the upper chest, and gugrley crackley, fluid-y sounds in the lower portions. I don’t know enough about what that means to make a diagnosis but I know that is BAD. And to hear her cough (or make her feeble attempt at coughing) made me cringe and pray that God would PLEASE put her lungs in my rib cage for just a few minutes so I could cough for her to clear them out, then give them back to her. So we’re wondering..collapsed lung? Lungs? How is she walking around with collapsed lungs? I don’t know. So she SHOULD get a chest x-ray to see what’s going on in that department but after consulting I-don’t-even-know-who, the decision was made to give her drugs first and hope that helped. X-rays here are 200 shillings. That’s $2.50. That’s crazy. Anyway, so she got her drugs and off she went, I guess. What a sad, really difficult life this poor woman must have had/is having. And to top it all off she can barely breathe. Oh yeah, and she weighs about 95 pounds, her ribs stick out so much you could lay your fingers in the space in between. But she just keeps on keeping on.

LIFE has been fantastic. I keep having evenings of lots of fun with the girls. They discovered I had a camera and so one night resulted in a 2-hour photo shoot, they were hysterical…both to me and to themselves. The older girls kept changing their outfits, they all wanted to dance for the camera (which did nothing but make the pictures blurry) and make all these silly poses. It was a riot to watch though, as they learned how to take the pictures and go back and forth between taking and viewing them. J This week there is a conference here for all the pastors in the area so Nancy and one other woman have been cooking for them, so yesterday after clinic I joined them and all the girls in cutting up cabbage for them. It all ended up going into a pot I could have comfortably sat in and even brought a little kid in with me. But. I was officially schooled in the art of shredding vegetables with not cutting board…at first I was just hysterically laughing at myself shredding cabbage, as were all the girls, because I could not manage to get the shreds small enough or figure out what direction I should be chopping in to get slices and not sheets…eventually I figured it out and decided it was actually quite fun…we all know how I like to systematically destroy things by picking them apart bit-by-bit. As with all skills it seems, it’s all in the wrist. Actually it’s not..it’s in the elbow, you have to keep your wrist locked, that was my problem. Maybe it IS all in the wrist then? So I’m glad I got to learn that/they got to laugh at me…but it was also just a good time to enjoy, because after the chopping was done, a bunch of people were just hanging out in the “church kitchen” (which is really just a very small room with cabinets of plates and what not, GIANT pots that I could sleep in if I brought a blanket, and some couches…the “stove” is a firepit outside and the “sink” is a spigot sticking out of the groud 50 ft away) hanging out and people asking me stuff about the US, and trying to teach me random things in Swahili and Kikuyu at the same time but not telling me which language it was…the Kenyans making fun of each other’s English and me being very glad that I happened to not have my cell phone with me, nor my number memorized as a good excuse to someone who wanted it. :-D During that time Alice, the 11 year old, was physically attached to me for the full 3.5 hours we were there. So if you’ve MET me you know I LOVE physical touch, so of course I was MORE than happy to let her hug me and lean on me and put her arm around me and play with my hair or my fingers or whatever…especially because I feel physical touch-starved in this culture full of handshakes but few hugs (although here, the women greet each other with a hand clasp-cheek touch, other cheek-touch which is not AS good as a hug but it’s better than just a handshake) and I was thinking…I love that she wants to sit on my lap and give me a hug and keep burying her face in my “elbow-pit” as I used to call it (before of course I learned that it’s called the antebrachial fossa) because IIIIII feel affection-starved, her whole LIFE must be like this, you know!? So I am only too glad to squeeze her right back cuz it is nice for both of us, and if just for the month that I’m here I can let her feel how wonderful it feels to have a hug, that would be awesome. So while this is going on I see the 12-year old, Faith, looking at us, and I’m like “ooh, she wants my LOVE too!” (haha) so I stuck Alice on one side of me and her on the other and just had my arms around them, and we skipped home with our arms around each other that night, cuz you know, even though their ages ADD to just about my age, they’re both the same height as me. It’s so nice hanging out with 11 and 12 year olds when you’re not responsible at all. You can just love them and hug them to bits and be silly and say silly things and make funny faces and instead of giving you weird looks, they just love you the more for it .

In which I intend to become an expert wheelchair artist, and am irrationally kept awake at night by thoughts of mosquitoes....but only their sound.

So, no news on the med school front, except thanks for your encouragement/prayers. J

The clinic is going s-l-o-w…there’s been a steady increase in patients each month since they opened, but I still spend way more time than I’d like reading my kindle every day at the clinic. Some non-medical things have happened to liven up my days though:

On Wednesday a new exam table arrived, which came on the container the Basses received in Feb., as well as a wheelchair. It came in one piece except for the footrests, which took, for some reason, a while to figure out how to attach them, and then one of them was, for some reason, rusty and that took a while to fix. After the 5 people who were trying to put it together got it together, I took it for a spin around the clinic and then in the grass outside, it was quite fun. Then I told Edwin to have a turn, and decided that to pass the time we should learn to do wheelies and other tricks. Then we should perform said tricks right outside the compound gate to attract patients.
A short time later Danny and Chrissy came with some people who had helped gather the equipment that was in the container to show them where it was being used, so they took lots of pictures and video. One of the women brought little hotel-sized shampoo, conditioner, soap, and lotion for the girls. They were all at school so the gave the bag to Nancy. After they left Nancy takes out the bag and asks me what all this stuff is, so I was telling her what it was and what you use conditioner for, and that white people shampoo their hair every day, and she was looking at it like “what on earth am I supposed to do with all this” but she just kept saying “oh…well God bless her!” It was funny. So the bag went into the cabinet, I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day...they at least can use the soaps and lotions. At least the thought counted. ;)
Yesterday we got a shipment of supplies from the government’s Ministry of Health…a very funny one. There was a box with a machine that heat-seals blood tubing…like when you donate blood and they clamp those metal clamps onto the tubing? This machine of 2x1x1ft all to seal tubes that we don’t even have. Great. So the next box is like 100 rolls of that sticky, foamy ace bandage stuff like they use when you donate blood, except not fun colors. We’re like…wow…there’s a LOT of this stuff, we’ll never use this much! So of course if that wasn’t enough, the next two boxes are…more of the same! So now we have hundreds of rolls of this stuff, and barely any patients coming at all, let alone with injuries we’d need to tape up. Oooh well. At least the thought counted? They did send sooome useful things…some insulin syringes and 2 boxes with all the gloves, alcohol swabs, syringes, needles, and drugs necessary for 100 injections of contraceptives in each box. I don’t foresee doing that many for a long time, even in the busy clinics “family planning” as they call it, wasn’t an overly common thing, but the syringes will be useful to inject the other things we have, and previously had without needles. So if someone runs in in the middle of an anaphylactic shock, we can inject the adrenaline now instead of wishing we had needles while I debate whether I should try an emergency tracheotomy with only a youtube instructional video’s experience. :-p
With the above-mentioned wheelchair came what is perhaps one of the most wonderful inventions of all time: bubble wrap. Now I noticed this bubble wrap while the preschool class was having their recess time outside. So I thought to myself “this is gonna be brilliant” and brought the bubble wrap over to the 10-ish 4-year olds and showed them, in my feeble attempts at Swahili, how to pop the bubbles. They, of course, LOVED it. They thought it was the funniest thing ever, and were at it non-stop for almost an hour. And anyone who’s ever met a 4-year old knows how difficult it is to keep their attention for an hour. :-p But after about 15 minutes of course they got pushy and I had to play moderator, and show the kids that it was indeed better to try to enter the circle around this 3ftx1ft piece of bubble wrap in an empty spot instead of trying to squeeze between two kids already standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Eventually I realized the wrap was perforated in 1 ft squares, so I ripped them up and split them into 3 groups, each with 3 kids at it, and felt like an awesome biologist for maximizing the surface area to volume ratio. (If you have ever taken a bio class, you know the answer to 64% of questions is “increased surface area to volume ratio). So then the teacher came over and told them to sing for me, so then I was staring at these 3 little stations of 4 year olds popping bubble wrap for the first time in their lives, singing “Row, row, row your boat” and other little ditties to me, and it was awesome…especially because it’s really funny to hear kids singing in English with perfectly precise-sounding rolled “r”s.

Hm…now I will tell you about sleeping.
I’m in a room with 2 other girls, on a bottom bunk with no person on the top. Great, fine. However, there are mosquitoes that for some reason like to hover juuuust around my ear some nights. I don’t know if it’s because my head is the only exposed skin they can find, the rest being under a sheet, but I never noticed until I got to Kenya that a mosquito buzz is quite distinct from all the other buzzing bugs. Now I’m not worried about being bitten by one, because unlike my childhood full of week-long periods of incessant itchiness that resulted in me creating giant scabs all over my legs from scratching at the bites so much, mosquito bites now-a-days seem to itch for an hour at most, and then the bump lasts a day or two, then just goes away. Also, I’m remembering to take malarone every day now so I’m not worried about malaria. But for some reason I just cannot fall asleep with these bugs near my head, and even the anticipation of that high-pitched whine rather than a low buzz keeps me awake. So I’ve started sleeping with the sheet pulled up to my shoulders and tucked over my ears, so I at least can’t hear the buzz. Some nights there must be more mosquitoes than others trapped in the room, so I resort to my ipod then, but the sheet-over-the-ear works pretty well, since the sheet-over-the-head makes it a little difficult to breathe fresh air. Not that my breath smells bad, but cool, 20% oxygen air just feels so much better than then pre-warmed, oxygen-depleted stuff coming from my lungs.

Also, my fears about the too much and too special food are coming true. Despite being told that I am no longer a visitor and just “one of us” and my special treatment was only supposed to last 2 days, I’m still getting a separate dinner and lunch cooked for me every day, at least 1 and often 2 pieces of fruit with every meal, and tea served to me in the morning between breakfast and lunch and again between lunch and dinner. Not to mention that with the tea comes some giant pile of carbohydrates I’m supposed to stuff myself with, even though I’m juuust getting over the giant previous meal I had.
So I’m trying to figure out if it’s a good idea/what is the best way to talk to Nancy about this…making very clearly the point that I sincerely appreciate everything she’s doing for me and the food has been wonderful, but I really don’t need, and really don’t even want all the extra food, or the special treatment and GIANT portion sizes when I actually do want to eat (you know, 3 meals). So…we’ll see what happens with that I guess. I don’t want to offend people but I’m new enough to this culture that I don’t know what would be offensive or not, especially since after diner the first 3 nights she said “I am so happy you did not refuse to eat this food” Was she expecting me to? And does asking her to feed me fewer times per day count as refusing food, or only once it’s put in a plate in front of me?

I am loooooving the time I get to spend with the girls here. I’m beginning to see their personalities and it’s awesome. The other day we spent a good half hour while they were supposed to be doing school work and I was supposed to be reading my Bible, showing each other all the funny faces and weird noises we could make with our bodies, including clicking joints, flipping eyelids, rolling our eyes back into our heads…fun stuff. Not what you’d think of as a real quality bonding activity, but I think it was a big step in the girls’ getting over their shyness with me. The one who used to hide behind anything she could find...from a door to a wall to her own hand, now smiles and makes funny faces at me whenever I see her, and will actually talk to me now. Progress! J Yesterday I had my laptop out and ended up showing them pictures on facebook of my family and myself pre-haircut….they seem to be in Emmy’s camp of liking it much better long and telling me to “never cut it again!” haha!

Ooohkay, this is getting very long, so I will give you a break now. :-D