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