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Published: November 4th 2008
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Madeleine, Elin, and I
Halloween! Check out the black eye! I'm on my last week of volunteering! Hard to believe! The time has gone by really fast! So where did I leave off? Last Friday morning I had Mwandi Home-Based Care. It was my first time on a home-based care other than Maramba. The houses in Mwandi were more basic, mostly made out of mud and sticks instead of bricks and concrete. More what I was expecting the compound areas to look like. I think Maramba is more affluent (comparatively, of course) than the rest of the compounds. We saw 7 patients. I haven't had any extreme cases. One guy had deep splits in his heel and toe that were probably almost a centimeter deep, but that's about it. Most people have HIV and/or TB. The roads are all sand. And not just sand, sand like on a beach so your feet actually sink in. More of a workout that way which is good. In the afternoon I had Adult Literacy. We're starting a new group so it was just basic stuff... learning the sounds that the alphabet letters make, basic spelling, and basic reading. One woman had TB and she honestly sounded like she was dying when she coughed! She
was taking medicine at least. I'm not sure how long TB stays contagious once you're on the meds...
Friday night was Halloween so we had a party at Fez Bar. There were actually a lot of people there! The most white people I've seen in one place since being in Africa! None of us had brought Halloween costumes but we managed to scrounge a bunch of stuff together. Madeleine and I were patients and Elin was a doctor. I had a black eye that multiple people thought was real. There were also togas, pirates, cheetahs, Zorro, 118, mango, and a bunch of other stuff, all homemade with limited supplies in a short amount of time. Pretty impressive I think! We didn't have any chocolate candy bars though so we had to make do with chocolate molten cake at Fez Bar. Which is exquisitely amazing!
Weekend was normal relaxing at Zambezi Sun. On Saturday we did a dinner/sunset cruise on the Zambezi River. The food was pretty bad but the scenery was good and we saw some hippos. The sunset wasn't spectacular because it was cloudy. We even got some thunder, lightening, and a drizzle later on. The cruise
Halloween!
Yes you can come up with good costumes with no supplies in the middle of Africa! was also unlimited drinks. Some people got a little carried away so we had an interesting night once we got back to the house trying to get a couple people into bed... It was fun though!
Monday I had Linda Clinic in the morning on my own and then Maramba home-based care in the afternoon. All the patients on home-based care were feeling much better and looking healthier! It's really nice to get days like that where you can actually see that people are improving! One patient we saw was a 10-year old boy with HIV. He had had problems in the past, but he was running around and playing with the other kids just like any normal boy.
Monday was Elin's last day so after dinner we went to Fez Bar for a good-bye party. Everyone was there for a while but 5 of us (Elin, Madeleine, Warren, Tom, and I) stayed until almost midnight and then went back to the house and stayed up talking until 2:30. And we had to be up at 7 this morning. But it was Elin's last night so it was worth it. Sad this morning when she left!
Tuesday I
Goodbye Elin!
Me, Elin, Warren, Tom was at Mwandi Home-based care again. We saw a lot of the same patients and most of them were still doing okay. In the afternoon I had HIVE planning again.
The African Encounter lion project finally got permission to bring lions into Zambia from Zimbabwe! They've been working on it for years so it's a pretty big deal! Now they have 6 (I think) 6-month old cubs! And guess what?! We get to go see them! In small groups of course. 3 of us are going in about an hour. I'm so excited!
We didn't have any election trouble here. Banda won and he was popular here so there were no problems for us. The Copperbelt area wanted Sata so they might have had some protests, I haven't heard, but we were fine here. Now we have the US elections! Today in fact! I'm waking up early tomorrow morning to watch BBC to find out the results! Hopefully Obama will pull through!
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