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