In which I make 78 chapati and pick the ends of 30000000 green beans

I’ve been keeping this suuuper detailed journal of basically everything I can think of over this trip. About once per month I get sick of writing in it and get really slacking for a couple of days. This is that time. So instead of writing in the journal I decided to write a blog post…because typing is so much easier than writing stuff out, especially when my pen gets moody and decides to go back and forth between behaving and being a headache.

So as you can see, the world did not end, so we all live on. I am going to tell you two things that are seemingly unrelated, and then I will connect them for you…. 1. It’s the thing to do here, in Christian circles, to begin every semi-public episode of speaking with “Praise the Lord” (everyone says “amen”) and then “I am saved” or “I love Jesus Christ as my personal savior” and then you say what you actually wanted to say. 2. There is this guy who comes to the house every night to help the kids with their homework. The connection is Friday we were having the Bible study, and before the Bible study everyone is supposed to share a small something…a verse, or sometimes they sing a song…whatever they want. So this guy says “praise God” (“amen”) “I am not saved, but I believe in Christ” and then went on. So while we were eating dinner later I said “I’m confused…explain to me what you believe that you believe Jesus is Christ but don’t consider yourself “saved”” so he told me that he believes Jesus is the son of God, and part of the trinity equal with God, and that He died for our sins…and that he himself is a sinner (the guy, not Jesus…:-P) but “I haven’t repented”. I don’t understand how or why one would believe these things but not take the very small but gravely important next step of official acceptance of that forgiveness. What is he waiting for? I always assumed the thing separating people from that decision was usually a lack of belief, not a present belief but apathy towards making a decision? Maybe it isn’t, or maybe it’s just this guy.
I told him the world very well might end tomorrow so he’d best make a decision soon, but he didn’t and the world didn’t. So today I told him God gave him another day to make that choice, but the whole thing doesn’t seem to weigh much on his mind. I can’t fathom that, but it’s his choice.

Friday was AWESOME in the clinic…medically. AWFUL non-medically. Warning this paragraph talks about small children and their 2^nd and 3^rd degree burns.
As in, two little kids came in with really bad burns, from separate unrelated occurrences. I was expecting a third because medical things are supposed to come in threes but there wasn’t.
The first was a 4 year old boy with a 3-day-old burn all up the outside of his left leg. On the calf was maybe 2 square inches of 3^rd degree burn, and the thigh had 3 or 4 of 2^nd degree. So we peeled off the skin and scab and gooped on silver sulfadiazine (I still love that word) and paraffin gauze and wrapped him up. What was strange was that he was wearing a pink dress (it’s not unusual to see little boys here in very girly clothes or shoes…the cultural connotation of ruffles and pink and “cutie” or “princess” written on clothes making them girly is non-existent here …but the boys don’t wear dresses. That wasn’t thaaaat weird because he did have this burn and who wants to wear pants with the whole side of your leg is burned? But his toenails were painted. That I’ve never seen on a male here. Oh well.
Burn number two was a 3-yr old girl, this burn was veeery recent. I think she somehow got boiling water spilled all over her ankles. I don’t know how this happened, but her toes are completely fine (thankfully) but the tops of her feet, 360 deg. around her ankle, and the heel just up to the bottom of the foot have no skin. It just all peeled off and was sitting wrapped around the bottom of her ankle like baggy socks. So we had to cut it off, which as you can imagine was highly unpleasant for the poor girl. Awful for her, but medically intriguing. So she also got gooped (or “ooged” as Heidi likes to call it…) and gauzed and sent home. She came back today for a bandage change which she enjoyed equally as much as the original I’m sure.
Oh PS both episodes, neither kid had any painkillers. They both got ibuprofen to take at home. It is beyone me why they don’t get something stronger, at least for the part where we go poking around their open wounds and peeling off their skin, ya know?

Soooo today was also fantastic. It was raining this morning so for a while we had no patients in the clinic, and I remembered that I have the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings on my ipod, so I watched the Fellowship and the first quarter of the Two Towers…that was fun. J
Then I got home and some people were doing laundry outside while others were picking the stems off massive amounts of string beans, then cutting them into tiny pieces to freeze. So I sat down and started taking the ends off, and did that for a while before the post that holds up the clotheslines decided it did not like being pulled by 3 full ropes in 1 direction and 1 perpendicular to it, and fell down. So a bunch of us ran to pull it back up…I ended up climbing halfway up the post and hanging off it to keep it taught…for like 10 minutes…while they dug the bottom 2-feet that was buried in the ground and broke off…out of the ground. That was fun. :-P Then (after 3 brilliant ideas by Danielle..after each of which Simon said “I am using my brains!” (and I said “no, you’re using MY brains. :-P))they got the bottom of the post out and put the rest back in the hole. It was still leaning so then we had to jam some stones and other stuff into the hole to make it stay up….then we used the 2 feet that had been in the ground to support the post in the direction it had originally fallen.
I don’t know if ANY of that made sense to you, just from reading it…I hope so. The point is, my Daddy should be proud of my engineering skills today.

Then I made 78 chapati. (in case you forgot/never knew, chapati are flat, round bread-things…sort of like tortillas but with 500 times more oil and therefore 500 times tastier.) It was quite laborious, but I was complimented on being a quick learner…apparently the last mzungu MammaAlice tried to teach this art (it truly is an art) to failed miserably. We made dough in the usual way…water, flour, sugar, salt…and then kneaded it in a flat-bottomed basin using our fists to basically punch the dough into being mixed. There were 5kg of flour, so it was a lot of dough. Then we made the chapati the same way I made it last time and told you about it, but I was a much more active participant this time. The key, I learned, is to keep flipping it over and make sure it’s well floured, so the middle of the ball of dough doesn’t stick to the table… otherwise its harder to make it into a perfect circle. At first I was telling MammaAlice that she must be magical because hers seemed to just WANT to be circles, while mine wanted to be either amorphous or square. Eventually I figured out the flipping and flouring thing and it was better. Then I moved to the cooking them part, which always scares me because I have an extremely low tolerance for heat (right Heidi!?!?) and they often just grab them off the grill with their fingers. So a couple times I almost dropped it on the floor and one time had to use my leg to hold the rolled-out chapati because I had to readjust my hands so many times because I was scared I wasn’t gonna get the right angle to drop it onto the cast iron disc they’re cooked on. That one had a corner…so I ate it. :-P

Then we had dinner and I ate 2 chapati and spent more time picking the ends off green beans. I really had no need for another 2 chapati but I love them so I am full tonight. Which I figure is allowed since I’ve been avoiding being stuffed very well lately.
Thankfully, most of the beans are getting frozen so we might be able to stop eating them twice a day every day like I’ve been doing for the past 5 days.