Welcome Home!

After Team Canada left, I had a couple days to finish preparing to move.....up country. Duh duh duh (sound menacing?) Don't worry, it's not really scary. I did feel a little apprehensive because I was moving away from the family that I know and love to a place where I essentially don't know anyone. I was also looking at finally putting my Nurse Practitioner training into action.....scary. :) But off I went.
My road trip had two parts. Remeber "Ali?" He was the kiddo who broke his leg when the first medical team was here. After a month and a half of the majority of his leg being casted in 95 degree weather, he was ready for it to come off! Last time I went and dropped him off his family asked if I would stay in the village with them but I'd already made arrangements somewhere else. This time I decided to stay there. It was my first time staying overnight in the village so I was excited. Here are a couple pictures from my stay.

Village

This was where they got their water.

(The expression on this kids face KILLS me! I literally laugh out loud when I look at it!)

I was a little concerned about what we would do while I was there. Because the language barrier can be kind of difficult, I was afraid there would be a lot of sitting and staring at each other. But it never ceases to amaze me at how a camera and attempting to speak the tribal language can provide hours of entertainment and laughs. They were laughing with me not at me right???

At one point I brought out a Sharpie to write on Ali's cast. It was so white and boring that I thought it would be fun for people to write on it. Apparently only fun for me. By the end it was pretty much just some men of the village who wrote something....and I definitely got the impression they were just doing it to humor me. I even pulled out all the stops and harnessed my inner cheerleader to write people's names in cool block letters. Nothing! I think they were all just relieved when I let them stop. :)

We left early the next morning for our long day drip. I happened to look at the map before we left and noticed that we were basically driving from the bottom of the country to the top of it. Sweet! Fortunately my friend let me use his car and that thing is awesome!! I think I could scale a cliff face with that thing!

We arrived and Ali was really excited to get his cast off! Unfortunately the generator started having problems just as we were about to use the electric saw so we had to delay it a bit. After a couple hours Ali asked if I should just go get a machete so we could take it off ourselves. Ummm....... negative ghost rider. When it was finally time, he did awesome! After a couple days of physical therapy we'll send him back. I'm not sure if/when I'll get to see him again and I'm going to miss him!

I had a little bit of excitement myself when I arrived here. SOMEBODY (Ali) said that the air conditioning in the car was too cold so we rode with the windows down instead. I noticed that my eyes were really dry and even stopped once to fix my contact. Well, that night I had a hard time getting my contacts out and was a little forceful (whoops). After spending the night with my left eye perpetually watering, I woke up with my eye swollen shut and extremely sensitive to the sun. Awesome. My first impression of meeting everyone was an inability to look them in the eye.

I showed up for my first day of work and the guy who was giving me the tour made it as far as the first stop and then sent me to the pharmacy to get something for eye and told me to come back on Monday (this was Thursday).

One of the doctors here took a look at my eye and said I had a pretty good scratch on my cornea.....and I needed a patch. A what??? They said it should be better after 24 hours if I kept it patched. So I got this little beauty.

Awesome first impression.

Later that afternoon it was still really sensitive to light and everytime I moved my right eye my left one would hurt from the movement. By this time I'd had a visitor tell me a story about how the same thing happened to his wife and she ended up getting an amoeba in her eye and she was out of commission for months. WHAT!?!?!? I really didn't want to use my emergency medical insurance for THIS! Lame!

I decided that in order to prevent my own blindness I'd better rest my eye as much as possible. So I went to my house, sat in my living room and literally stared straight ahead....at my eyelids...for 3 hours. That's all I could take.

Well, I'm happy to say that the patch seemed to work because I woke up the next morning feeling awesome! I got the patch taken off and now feel like a real human being again (as opposed to the freak of nature I felt like before!) People stared.....and I saw at least two literally move away when I got near them. Sheesh. Thank you Jesus SO much that I feel better! The drama queen in me thought I'd be blind by now for sure!