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The Adventure Continues!
 A monkey tried to steal my breakfast
yesterday. Just when I'm thinking the little black-faced vervet
monkeys are so cute, one very cheeky monkey decided he liked the looks of my
toast. He came sneaking in to the open-air dining room, and I saw his
very little hand reaching up the chair across from me. When I tried to
scare him away, he just looked at me with his unnervingly intelligent beady
black eyes. The kitchen guys came out, and he ran off toastless.
Turns out monkeys are quite sexist and are unafraid of female humans.
I'm giving them a bit of a wide berth now, though they're still cute jumping
from tree to tree.
 Two nights ago I peeked around the corner of
my house on the way from the truck to the front door and saw two eyes
attached to a very large body staring back-- a Hippo -- and only about five
feet from my door! I'm embarrassed to admit I may have given a very
small little shriek. I think I scared the hippo as much as he scared
me!
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Some true admirers of the truck |
The "doctor's vehicle" continues to be my
main source of real adventure. It's hard to describe just how rickety
a chitty it is since in most places it wouldn't be allowed on the road.
The steering is a great guessing game trying to decide how far I need to
turn the wheel before anything happens then finding out exactly which way it
goes. This can be a problem since the road is filled with all sorts of
obstacles -- people walking, people on bikes, baboons, the occasional
elephant, and African sized potholes. Very exciting! I made the
mistake of turning on the fan in the heat of the day, and I was engulfed in
a huge cloud of dust. One of the headlights was bouncing around and
pointing up which made it great for spotting leopards in the trees at night
but not so great for seeing the road. Patrick and the guys fixed it
with all sorts of wire winding around the light to the body of the truck.
All in all, as long as it gets me around I suppose it's okay.
On the medical front, my tourist and camp
staff calls have ranged from simple earaches after flying to diarrhea to a
phone call about a client at a camp who was spat in the eye by a cobra- not
something I saw every day on Orcas! The two kinds of cobras here
(Mozambican and Black necked) have a hole in the front of their fangs so
they can "spit" venom about 6 feet into the victim’s eyes before they go in
for the bite. I think the client will have quite a story to tell when she
gets home!
 The
clinic continues to be a source of endless fascination and frustration.
The last patient I saw today was a 20-month-old little girl who only weighs
15 pounds and looks as wasted and starving as that sounds. I suspect
she's HIV positive though she has not yet been sent to the referral hospital
for testing. I saw a 7-year-old little boy earlier this week who
probably has kidney and now heart failure. I sent him to the referral
hospital, but they don't have much to offer him either. Seeing kids
like these makes me feel very sad and quite helpless at times.
 On the happy side, I admitted a nine-year-old
girl with malaria and dehydration who I really thought would die on Tuesday.
Today she was sitting outside her room and smiling when I came in.
Amazing what oral rehydration salts and anti-malaria medicine can do!
Yesterday, I saw a little girl who probably has a non-displaced broken
wrist. Unfortunately, we have no plaster of Paris and of course no
fiberglass here. The family couldn't afford to go to the referral
hospital in Kamoto, so I made her a splint out of a two-liter plastic drink
bottle and lots of cotton wool padding. In the end I was pretty happy
I could figure something out. I think those small successes will keep
me going here.
 So I'm settling in here. I hope I don't
become nonchalant about living with baboons and elephants and giraffes and
lose the wonder of it all, but I don't think I will. I'm off into the
African sun for another day of adventure.
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