A Week in Review

-I really like the neighborhood that we are working in.  In a lot of ways it is much different from where I grew up.  It is basically comprised of lots and lots of small cement houses/shacks with tin roofs.  There are tons of stray dogs and trash all over the dirt roads.  But as different as it is, I keep noticing funny similarities too.  This one little girl was dancing around in the church and tried to do a summersault on the dirt floor of the church.  I used to do random summersaults in public buildings when I was little too.  It´s actually how I got lice when I was 4.  This little girl is so cool– she definitely had a fat lip and her face was a little scraped up the first day we met her.  That may have been my normal appearance as a child as well.  Another little girl had a pretty recent scar on her throat.  Her mom said she had recently had surgery on her throat.  I definitely had surgery on my throat when I was a toddler, so I have a scar in the exact same spot.  I saw a little boy wearing an Oshkosh youth baseball t-shirt and almost laughed when I looked down at the UW-Oshkosh t-shirt that I was wearing.  And even just in general watching the kids and their personalities, they are so much like kids from the US.  There´s always the mischevious trouble maker, the shy, quiet kid who walks up slowly and just waits for you to notice them, the kid who runs up and hugs you and will sit on your lap and talk on and on even if you have no idea what they are saying, and so many more.  I love seeing so many similarities!

– Dude.  I´ve totally been using the nursing skills even more.  One of the teams is working in a village where there is a little girl who has pretty severe third degree burns.  Her mom said that an oil candle fell on her on Christmas Day.  Her dress caught on fire and now she is burned under her armpit, on her lower back, butt, and the backs of both of her legs.  This happened almost a month ago now and all of her burns still completely raw and totally infected.  The day I went to visit her she had no clothes on and was just laying on her stomach on an old dirty mattress.  We brought burn cream, gauze, and tape.  So after some wound cleansing, we put dressings over all of the burns.  She practically looked like a mummy by the time we were done.  As you can imagine, the little girl was not all too excited about having her wounds cleaned and dressed, so Tiffany brought her a teddy bear and some sprite and she cheered right up.  There is already progress towards healing and hopefully she will continue to get better.

– At the end of every day, I totally just zonk out.  It doesn´t matter if the lights are on and people are talking all around me– I´m totally out.  I wondered for a moment why that was.  It´s not like we are doing crazy manual labor or anything.  But then I thought more about my day and what I had actually done.  I had gotten up early and walked 40 minutes to the village to see the little girl with the burns.  After staying in that village for the morning, I walked the 40 minutes back to the house we are staying in.  I ate a quick lunch and met with my team members.  Then we walked 40 minutes the neighborhood we are working in, walked around in the neighborhood and at the end of the night, walked the 40 minutes back to our house.  All right, now let´s do a little math.  Now I am not a very fast walker, so it probably takes me 20 minutes to walk a mile.  Let me just do a quick calculation.  And the reason for my exhaustion: walking 8 miles in flip flops.  Yup, that´d do it.