June 24

June 24, 2011

We are sort of getting a day time routine down.  We head off to the office at 6:45 so we can miss most of the traffic which can be pretty awful some mornings, although it doesn’t necessarily mean we always miss it.  This morning took us almost 40 minutes when it usually takes us about 10 and we left the same time we usually do.  Go figure. 

We then spend the day trying to get as much work done as we can, then head home about 2 or 3 to beat the traffic then.  But the afternoon still usually takes us about an hour.

This morning we worked on taking inventory of which medications we have in the office and what they are used for and if we needed more of anything.  We then did our first trip to the pharmacy by ourselves!  We have a map with the pharmacy marked, but none of the streets are marked so it makes it a little difficult.  So you try to count streets, but then some of the streets aren’t on the map!  So it makes it pretty interesting.  My job was navigating and Todd’s was to avoid being hit.  I thought at first that I knew where we were on the map, then suddenly we were on a major road that wasn’t on the map and I was totally lost and confused!  We were starting to maybe panic a bit but then we drove by the temple!(which is where we had started) We can come a complete circle and didn’t even know it!  I was SO not where I thought we were on the map!  So we tried it again and again got completely lost! I’d think I might know where we were and then no, I didn’t, so we just kept driving around thinking we might know where we were occasionally then we turned a corner and BAMM!  There was the pharmacy!  We were not even close to it on the map by the way!  There was definitely some Divine intervention going on today, that is the only explanation!  But we managed to get all the medications we needed AND make it back to the office.  What a red letter day!

We also had quite a few people stopping by the office today to see the Dr. Including one asthma attack that was pretty severe, but we got her all fixed up and back on her way.  So it turned out to be quite a busy but fulfilling day. 

June 25, 2011

We took the Pages out with us to the MTC today to meet the new group of missionaries.  There are 46 in this group and about half don’t speak English so it was an interesting experience and my French is not holding up past “hello and how are you?”  very pathetic!  If I had more time, I’d work on it, but as of right now we are pretty dang busy just trying to keep our head above water!

We had an idea to try out for immunizations today and it worked like a charm!  We discovered last time that they LOVE to have their picture taken, they call them snaps.  You pull out a camera and instantly you have 10 missionaries all huddled in a group wanting their picture taken.  So we decided to run a contest to see who had the bested and worstest faces while getting their shots.  Turns out they are so focused on getting their picture taken they mostly ignore the shot!  It worked really well, I think we may be onto something!  Sister Page did the polio drops, Brother Page ran the camera and Todd and I did shots, it worked out pretty smoothly. 

After the MTC the Pages took us to what it called the Pit.  Mostly it’s a large crater that is filled with tons of the little hut kiosts.  So we spent a few hours wandering from shop to shop looking at all the pretty stuff for sale.  Lots and lots of carvings, all of them hand-done.  We got a little bowl, that is probably my favorite right now, it’s got a little carved giraffe drinking out of it, it’s so cute!

June 28, 2011

We spent Sunday and Monday frantically trying to get our MTC health lecture ready to go for today.  We are doing a power-point presentation, which is good.  And we had 3 or 4 previous power-points to kind of pick and choose from, which is good as well.  It’s just took us some time to decide what we want and which one of us was going to do what.  But we finally got it all put together late last night.

Our presentation went really well I think, we might change a few things here and there but for the most part it went well.  Todd put together a personal introduction at the beginning that showed a bunch of pictures of North Dakota in the winter, as most of them have never seen snow.  They found that part pretty entertaining I think!

The second set of shots went really good as well, we are slowing coming up with a system to seems to work.  This time we didn’t have the Pages, so we used missionaries.  We had one running the camera and another running the paperwork, which worked out really well.  Last time we had a missionary get two of the same shot, one from me and then one from Todd, he didn’t want to miss out on anything and didn’t understand that we were both giving the same shot!  Poor kid.  So this time we had a missionary in charge of making sure each one got what he needed but no more!  Again the pictures worked like a charm,  what a simple solution! 

June 29, 2011

Today we went with a humanitarian volunteer to visit one of his schools.  We weren’t really sure where or what we were doing, but thought it sounded like fun.  And it really was!  Chris is a graduate student from BYU and he works with this company called Empower that takes merry-go-rounds and swing sets and sets them up in very rural schools that don’t have power.  The equipment is set up with windmill generators that create electricity!  It’s an awesome concept! 

So we drove for like 2 hours then stopped in this little village, which we walked through to get to the beach.  We then got into a boat and drove about 15 minutes up-river to what they call an island village.  The boat ride was very beautiful.  The villages main economy is clams.  They take like rota-tiller motors and hook them to like a garden hose somehow then use the hoses to breathe underwater while they are hunting for clams.  We saw lots of clam diver boats on the river, very creative! 

We got to this little village finally, and I’d tell you it’s name but I can’t pronounce it quite yet, let alone spell it!  They took us on a tour of the hospital there first.  And the one word Todd and I both came up with afterward is APPALLING!  I was expecting very basic what we saw should have been condemned 5 years ago.  The roof was literally falling in, in most of the rooms.  It was very dirty.  The patient rooms had a couple of metal bunks with two inch mattresses which were very filthy and nothing else.  The maternity rooms had a bed with a wooden crib, with no mattress at all.  Just plywood.  I could not imagine giving birth in these rooms and having anything survive!  Our little brains are whirling trying to figure out how to help. 

We then got to visit the school and it was so fun!  There are about 200 kids in this school and we got to see the elementary part of it.  The classrooms were very simple, a chalkboard, and student desks, but it was very clean and such a relief to see after the hospital!  The children there were very excited and happy to see us, especially after Todd pulled out his camera!  They LOVE to have their picture taken and they especially love to see it afterward.  So we got lots and lots of great pictures that Todd will have to blog for everyone.  We had a lot of fun with the kids and got to see the merry-go-round and swing set which were pretty cool.  Then back into the boat and back to the mainland.

We stopped for lunch on the way home and I tried the bangko.  Which is very similar to the foofoo.  They make bangko mostly out of corn.  They boil then mash it into some kind of sticky, white, hot dough.  You take a pinch and dip it into different sauces, pop it into your mouth and swallow it whole.  No chewing allowed!  So you learn to take smaller blobs, the bigger ones get harder to swallow.  The bangko itself is fairly flavorless, they use it as a filler, the stuff hits your stomach and sits there like a ton of bricks for the rest of the day.  That way they can just eat once a day and feel full for the rest of it.  Hey-  I bet it would be a great way to lose weight!  It wasn’t bad, but I think I want to try some different sauces, (they call them stews) I had a tomatoey one and a fishy one.  Chris, our tour guide for the day, says his favorite is one they make out of the local peanuts. 

All in all, it was a great day!  We really enjoyed getting out of the city and seeing the real Africa.  Looking forward to doing more of that in the coming months.