Next-to-last weekend

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Before I get too far into the weekend, I have a funny story to tell, at my expense.

Friday evening, as I was coming back home for the night, I got a call from Helen, a friend here in Zambia. She was calling because she wanted me to take a look at her friend's son, who was 2 years old and "refusing to feed himself". The conversation was cut short, because neither of us had talk time on our phones. Having spent the last three months in severe-malnutrition-awareness mode, I decided to go right over. I put together a sort of on-the-fly malnutrition/dehydration kit, and rode the minibus on over. When I got there, I discovered that the problem was not nearly as emergent as I'd feared. The child was, literally, refusing to feed himself, but he had always been like that, and would always eat if someone else was feeding him. I felt a bit sheepish, and ended up giving some ideas for behavior modification. On the plus side, I was in the neighborhood where Helen grew up, and I got to meet her grandmother and a bunch of cousins/nieces/nephews. It was a pretty big house, by Zambian standards, but it needed to be to fit all of those people there. Victor came and picked us all up, and we made tentative plans for dinner this week.

Saturday, I did a 20k run early, then went to the monthly Dutch Reform Church market and got most of my souvenir shopping done. Then, it was over to Arcades to get some work done, see the new Batman movie, and go bowling with the Ottawa students. I didn't end up getting home till kind of on the late side for me (10 pm-ish), and found the gate to Abundant Life closed and locked, with nobody there to open it for me. So I did what any law-abiding person does in a situation like that: I broke in, by climbing up the 10-foot gate, circumvented the spikes by moving along the roof of the guard hut, and dropped down the other side. Then, rebel that I am, I went to bed.

Sunday I ran in the morning, and then tried to get my re-learning of Access going. I left in the late morning to go to Naommy's home for lunch, and although I had only planned to be there for the meal, she had an HBC worker friend over as well, and she wanted me to come meet her family as well. So it ended up being a lot of visiting that day.

Today I went to Bwafwano in the morning, but didn't do much there except get ready for the clinics for the week. I walked over to Ubuntu to get some information I need to help them set up a client database. I still don't know if I'll be able to pull off doing this for them, but it can't hurt to try, right? That's the plan for the rest of the day, and also every evening for the next week. Don't expect a lot of updates.

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Comments

[Dad]

Souvenir shopping
If you want to bring back anything for me, some Zimbabwean currency would be nice. Get some with lots of zeroes -- they're on sale this week. Love Dad