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 .