SPAM - March 11th

Today is Sunday I’m not sure what I’ll do today. I’ve been reading The Night Circus. It took a bit to get into... more so because I was only reading 2 or 3 pages at a time and I was lost. But once I was able to read a larger CHUNK I started understanding that I don’t know what’s going on and that’s the point. I’m still kind of lost but I like it so far. I’m 20% into it. I love my kindle. The font size is big cause the next down is too small seeming… but this way I can set it on my lap and just sit there without losing my place.

I’ve also been playing the free game Jigsaw words… right now it’s on a Real or Make Believe? Titled puzzle but I can’t figure out what three of them are: a Symbolic Creature of Purity, a Werewolf and Mexican Gargoyle. I’ll have to look it up when the internet comes back on. It was driving me crazy last night.

Oh yeah! I won a game of Minesweeper on hard FINALLY! After so many games and attempts. It came down to 2 tiles and 1 mine. Either one of them would have satisfied the numbers surrounding them and I literally had to just guess. I got it.
That’s the closest I ever have gotten I usually get down to a chunk the size of like 20 tiles and no clues on which tiles will be mines and then I have to guess and I mess up.

What else have I been doing… nothing really. I’m going to edit some of Shayla’s engagement pictures today and hopefully be able to email some more tomorrow.

Knock on some dang good wood for me (I did), no stomach problems as of yet. I haven’t eaten anything too weird other than the soya. But we’ve had spaghetti, scrambled eggs, lots of soup, some noodle stuff, tuna salad (MOM I ATE IT! And I liked it!)…

The typical food here is Fu-fu and Jama-Jama. Fu-fu is made from ground corn and basically put into a spongy ball. Jama-Jama is made from wild huckleberry or bitter root (like leafy stuff), they just mash it up and like cook it somehow. Looks kind of like cooked spinach. I haven’t tried any of it yet.

At women’s day I made friends with one of the doctors kids with my camera. Little Bintu loves having her picture taken but man is she a little brat. She likes to scroll through my pictures and look at them all but she won’t let her brother Abu have a chance or take a look (? Sounded like Abdul Abu.. but apparently I wasn’t saying it right.. so in my blog his name is Abu).  Bintu is probably about 5 and Abu is probably 7 or 8, my guess. But they live right down below our duplex in another duplex on the hospital grounds. I went out to try to take some pictures of the crooked legs and Bintu and Abu came RUNNING to me. They wanted to see my pictures again and Bintu is just so grimy and dirty bleck. Then Abu brought some other friends over and we stood and looked at my pictures for like 20 minutes.  They each wanted to press the button and then Abu wanted to take some pictures. All the while Bintu is pulling on my freshly clean hasn’t been worn yet shirt.. and then guess what? She wipes her snotty nasty little nose on it and then looks at me like.. “oops” all innocent like. I mean it’s like dirt permanently caked under and around the fingernails and grimy snotty dried and runny nose and everything. Abu doesn’t look near is dirty, probably just the difference in age he knows how to wipe his nose. I really wanted to walk up to the hospital and take some pictures, but I got trapped!

Needless to say I came back and changed shirts, washed my hands and arms and used a Charmin wipe on my camera. Now I’m going to wash my hands again.

Then after reading for an hour out on the porch, little Bintu sees me and comes in the gate. This gate is no gate. It’s a balcony and porch gated off by a waste high railing style gate then a cement patio (with nothing in it) and then a gate gate, like entrance to someone’s property gate, big green with a door that opens within it. The Hake’s have never had them do that before. But she made a friend and just decided to come in. (Jim Terry and my dad are all up at the hospital making Sunday rounds as this happens, I don’t go with them after last weekend’s incident) I tell Bintu she can’t come in but she and several others start coming in anyway. So I go out there and scramble them away from the solar panel light chargers we had out charging up in the sun and start playing a game of ball with them. It was kind of funny kind of annoying. The big kids have NO respect for the little ones. Shoving them down the hill and hitting them and the ball away from them.  They all just yell “Hello, to me” over and over when I throw the ball to them. One little boy’s pants were around is thighs not his waste, another little girls dress wasn’t covering much as she sat on the hill and they were all covered in dirt. Then a couple little ones cry and then pick their noses. I played for about an hour and tried to come inside at one point after the game died down but they followed me; opened the gate right up. So I ran inside with my camera and kindle so they didn’t try to pick it up and play with it, and drop it. Ugh. Then I came back out told them they needed to leave they couldn’t be inside the gate and I had to drag them back out basically. As I finally got them back out Jim, Terry and my dad came up over the hill. Jim told Abdu (I heard another kid saying it and there is definitely a “d” sound in the name) that he cannot come inside the gate. So they put the little bar across it so it can’t be opened easily and we came in for pancakes.

The two little guys on the right played with me. The green ball is the ball we played with at first, and that's the little boy who's pants wouldn't stay up and would cry every time he didn't get the ball. 

The rainy season has arrived too! Yesterday it rained a little and we just had a great big storm. The rain just broke through and it started coming down.. it sounds a lot harder cause of the tin roof so we went outside and I mean it’s legitimate rain but it’s not like tons. Then it gets harder and harder. Huge drops of water, no lightness about it. It’s so loud inside the house with the tin roof and all the tin roofs around. It took quite a bit of rain to really get the ground wet it’s been dry for basically 3 months the dirt just sucked it up.

I can spend hours on the internet at home but not quite sure what to do when I don’t have it here. I keep falling asleep trying to read.

Guess what Terry and Jim hid in the casserole for dinner!? SPAM. Ha. As the ham pieces and it was not bad in one bit. Right after we finished Jim says, “We were trying to think of the best way to disguise our first serving of SPAM to you guys..” Ha ha it was really not that bad. I wouldn’t be able to look at it or read the ingredients but eh for a dinner in Africa…

Sardines, spam.. hrm what’s next.  

The Crooked Legs Have Arrived - March 10th

(writing this Sunday morning but won’t be able to post until later, probably Monday)

At Project Hope on Saturday’s they don’t dispense drugs so it’s more of a catch up and have meetings day. Mac was back in the office finally so he had me tally up all of the HIV screened people from the free screening they had done on Friday in Fundong. There were 656 people on the list and I tallied the number in each age group from < 15, 15-19 and so on up to 50+ and all the positive in each age group. There were only 15 positive in the entire group. I then did it a second time cause I had three more tallies than number of people. Ha ha. The second time I had 1 more tally than total people but whatever Mac said. Then we looked at the list of patients I had updated and he thought we should add more information. So we decided on age of starting treatment, sex and address (which is just the town/village they are from). Now I will be going through ALL of the files on the shelves in the treatment center and entering the information for ALL of those patients. Quite possibly it will take me the entire week.

My dad was called in to work often throughout the rest of the day. But we took a quick 35 minute walk into town and back (kind of a loop in one route back the other). We were sure sweating by the end. It was hot and it was 2 in the afternoon. We saw two interesting things. One was a woman with feet turned completely horizontally inward (if vertical was normal feet, looking down from above they look vertical). Crazy the deformities here. Then as we came up and around a curve a bunch of kids dressed as “Juju’s” came running toward us. They were wearing old cloth wrapped around them, some sort of mesh like lacy fabric wrapped around their faces and vines around their necks. Oh and ankle bracelets made with bottle caps so they jingled while they danced around. They chanted and banged drums made of old plastic bottles and used sharp pointed sticks as spears. Sadly I didn’t take my camera on this walk but my dad had his little one. The pictures didn’t turn out that well. Maybe they’ll be dressed up again today and I’ll take my big camera. It was so cute!

We saw the crooked legs. You’re probably wondering what I mean by that. Well every March and November a Dutch orthopedic surgeon and his team comes to straighten the legs of many children who travel from all over the country (possibly even from Nigeria). The crooked legs are like literally bowed out or in and the surgeons cut them up, straighten them out and cast them up. Njinikom Hospital is, for some reason, where they come to do this every year, and supposedly there are just massive amounts of kids and their guardians. Once casted up (both legs from hip to toe, with a bar between the ankles to they literally can’t move their legs in any direction) they have to stay here in Njinikom for up to 3 months sometimes depending on the patient for the legs to heal until the casts come off. Before the casts come off they are taken to another town for removal and physical therapy. I’m excited that we are here for this because it will be really interesting to see all of the little bowed legs. I’ll be sure to take MANY pictures. Last night at mass we saw about 4 or 5 who have arrived early because a photographer is here to “snap” them. The rest should be arriving next weekend probably along with the surgeon and his team. It costs next to nothing for them, if it costs at all. Jim said he thinks they encourage those with some money to pay a little but it’s not much. The surgeon obviously doesn’t do it for the money or get paid at all and supposedly his wife is a very generous donor while here as well.

We aren’t supposed to give out money and things because it just sets a precedent that all white people will give you things and SHOULD give you things. Sister X told us if we want to do anything to do it through her so that when they receive it they don’t recognize it as either coming from us or at all even.

Anyways so hopefully the internet will be okay enough to load a few pictures when the time comes.

March 9th

Today I started out with little to do. I filed the files away from yesterday and helped out with that kind of thing and then tried to organize and edit the document with all the mothers and babies in the HIV monitoring program. A man came in and was talking to Lillian in another language and she finally turned around and said “Do you know power point?” Ha ha so the man was doing a presentation the next morning but needed to put together the presentation. He had never used it so needed some help and had seen me earlier and when he couldn’t find anyone else to help him around the hospital he came back around to where I was and asked. So he gave me his flash drive that he thought he had saved his notes on but turns out he didn’t know how to do that as well. People here just aren’t used to computers; it’s a very uncommon skill so I was excited to get to help.  So we finally found his document on his computer, I put it on the flash drive and took it to the desktop. I then was able to go through and turn it into a powerpoint for him. He was very impressed (all I did was make it very blank and copy and paste his notes that he wanted as slides, oh and I corrected a lot of spelling and punctuation errors).  Then he asked for me to put a photo in on the last slide. The photo was in a PDF article so I couldn’t copy or save the picture from it. So using my tools and tricks from Moses Lake Industries, I found the “snipping tool” on the Windows 7 and was able to cut the photo and save it as a picture for him. Then when I put it into the power point he and Lillian laughed and just thought it was so great. Lillian even asked me to do it again so she could see how I did it. It was highly impressive I assure you all. It was nice to be able to help out with a skill I’m very good at.

This afternoon I just continued to help Lillian, cutting and counting pills. 

International Women's Day - March 8

(pictures soon I hope! I got some great ones!!!)

So do any of you women have March 8^th off each year? Many of them here do. It’s sure a day to be celebrated. I mean think of what the U.S. women’s rights movement was like 50 years ago, these women are out celebrating themselves. There is even a Cameroon Women’s Day fabric each year. Tuesday afternoon Terry and I went to see if there was extra fabric from the outfit Emmarencia made for her for women’s day and with the fabric Emmarencia was able to make me a dress and Terry picked it up Wednesday at 9:30. She was quick. I had the blue and yellow women’s day fabric. With the Cameroon flag and other symbols and women’s day stuff. So today we went down to the soccer field, where a grand stand was apparently until last month. We got a ride into town with Sister Xaveria. We got to sit with the Division Officer and First Lady of Njinikom, as well as many other important people. All of the women from Njinikom and the surrounding areas came dressed in the Women’s Day fabric or in their women’s group fabric. There were many many different women’s groups and thousands of people showed up. There were speakers, performances of dancing and singing, skits and marches.  It was pretty amazing the amount of enthusiasm of the women. The big theme was stomping out hunger and poverty, getting equality for the women in the councils and government and whatever else.

We sat there from about 10 this morning until about 3 this afternoon and it was still going on when we left.  They cut a cake and as Kristen (the peace corps worker) asks Terry why nobody ever eats the cake Sister Xaveria hands us a piece. Basically you have to donate money to get a piece of cake and she had donated 10000 francs or 20 dollars. She handed me the cake piece and I hadn’t had a single drink since 9 am and so sitting in the sun made me a bit parched. I took a bite.. and couldn’t swallow it cause the cake was so so dry.  And at one point under our canopy they passed out “sack lunches,” I guess you’d call them, in little plastic bags. It contained a piece of fish, a piece of chicken, a sandwich (Terry said it had fish paste smashed in the middle of it), and two puff puffs (basically a little fried dough ball). I ate one dough ball and that’s all. I was not going to get sick off something like that…

Then they passed out cokes so we had coke, but it was warm of course(nothing is cold) and so warm pop just fizzes and foams in your mouth, by the time you swallow it, it just sits in your stomach and doesn’t feel so nice.

Then Sister Xaveria helped us sneak out and we walked home. My feet were disgusting.. and now I have a bad sunburn on my back (I even used sunscreen!).  Okay it wasn’t so bad cause now it’s the next morning as I’m writing this and it’s barely noticeable.

For dinner the housekeeper cook gal Prisca made spaghetti noodles with egg and vegetables. It was pretty dang good.  Jim and Terry introduced us to Johnny’s Salad Elegance seasoning. They put it on their spaghetti noodles when they have spaghetti and just sprinkle it on things like that for extra flavor, and always have so they brought it here. I’m going to have to remember it when we get back home.

More Updated Documents and Peace Corps Workers

Wednesday March 7th

I met Mac up at the HIV treatment center and he showed me how to update another one of their document lists. This one is of the mothers with HIV and new babies tracking a month or more after birth to check if they are HIV positive or not. So I typed up all the names, all the villages they are from and baby names and whether or not they were tested positive or not. This took me about 3 hours and then I just helped Lillian and Quinta with the patients folders. She also had me breaking pills and cutting them into 1/3 and 2/3 pieces. She made fun of me cause I made a couple fly across the room and asked “How do I make it so they don’t fly?” so she repeated it over and over and showed me to cup the pill in my hand while I cut. I mean these were crappy craft like scissors on a little pharmacy counting tray.

I came home around 3 pm which was late! I was at work longer than my dad and Jim and it was “Date Night” as Terry and Jim call it. We walked down to the Midway (2^nd story bar place) and got “Music” or Mutzic beer again. I did drink a whole one myself this time. We met Laura, Sal and Kristen, all American Peace Corps workers. Sal and Kristen are in their first year and they are here in Njinikom and Laura is on her second year, she is down in Belo (20 minute bike ride).  I could never be a Peace Corps worker. I can’t imagine living off such a small budget and being thrown into a part of a country alone like that. They each have their own little houses but houses means an African like house. We also had a Soya (that meat stuff on a stick, it’s really very small).  It's not actually monkey meat.. they've already eaten all the monkey's around so they are long gone.

On the walk to and from town  (probably  1 mile one way) there were kids out everywhere and they all saw my camera and all yelled hello and wanted to shake our hands and have their pictures taken. I got TONS of cute kid photos yesterday! It’s so easy to get them when it’s nice and light outside and they all want to be in the picture they stand nice and still. Hopefully I’ll be able to post them when I go and upload this blog.

Last night was Popcorn night also so Terry and Jim made popcorn (on the stove of course) for dinner. I had a small bowl of soup because I can’t eat much popcorn without a stomach ache.  We watched a couple of episodes of Friends (from Season 3 that Danny had given me before I left).

I guess I should describe things other than experiences since yesterday wasn’t too big.

The house we are in is a duplex with a lower and upper part. The lower part we haven’t gone in at all because we are staying with Jim and Terry upstairs in their house. It’s like a main living and dining room pretty large, with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (toilet and sink) and a shower room (because they don’t use shower curtains here so Jim and Terry re-designed parts of the house when it was being built their first few months here cause water would get all over everything). The kitchen is off to the side in another room. The 2^nd bedroom is where my dad and I are, but basically it’s a small bedroom you walk through to get to the actual bedroom. So I’m in the sort of small bedroom sitting room and my dad is in the back bedroom. It’s kind of annoying that he has to walk through mine into his cause he will walk in even after I JUST SAID 30 SECONDS EARLIER… “Dad I’m changing so wait just a minute.” It’s happened like 3 times already he starts coming in. The doors are huge and don’t close easily so only on the bathroom and shower do we ever shut them. There are curtains over every bedroom door though so we just use those. Helps with airflow at night too. So with the curtain closed all the way and I’m changing.. he just starts coming in. He never listens to me.  Thank god we have our own room ish things though. My bed is a little twin cot thing. It’s saggy but pretty comfortable, and the pillows are “ROCK PILLOWS” for sure. Just like these light weight hard stuffed things. So it’s okay with my little make-shift pillow in a pillow case. I’ve still slept well every night so far. And we wake up to the roosters around 5:15 ish and then the sun at 6:10 and that’s when all the people start coming out. The little house behind my window directly has tons of cute kids that you can hear as soon as the sun comes up I swear. Which is fine. I’ve been waking up about 5 (if we go to church at 6) and about 6 on other days, and bed by 8:30 or 9 every night basically. It’s dark and there is nothing to do by then. The hospital opens around 7:30.

We are on the hospital/convent grounds and it’s all fenced in with guards at the entrance and they walk back to us by the back gate. There are many different buildings for different parts of the hospital. Only two or three are 2 story, the rest are just one story. And everything you walk out to get to different rooms but there are covered walkways for the rains. There are people everywhere all the time though. There is everything from extra space for in-patients, private rooms, big wards for about 15 in patients, the lab, the maternity ward.. cookhouse, another doctors house/duplex, our house/duplex, and the convent with several buildings. Right outside is the private catholic school that Terry works at, run by the nuns as well. There is also an orphanage on the hospital grounds with a few kids. This place is in the mountains, the jungle mountain basically… so we are on the side of a hill, walking out the door of the duplex we are 2 stories up but as we walk along the balcony to the gate we are on the ground level.
This is the cookhouse and Dr. Eugene's half of his duplex and the cow pasture down below. This is the view off the balcony out the front door of our house. Gives you an idea of what dry season looks like in Njinikom, Cameroon. Very jungle-y and farmland-y and hill-y and mountain-y. 

One of the sisters has cows that supposedly when it’s not calving season (also one just died so the best milker is raising 2 calves) they have cheese that is supposedly very good that they make right here. Project Hope raises pigs down there also and sells the pork as a fundraiser.

We exchanged money right here with the hospital because they can then use the hundreds and bank them. So that was really easy.

The sisters have been so accommodating to Jim and Terry, they provided them with a TV and satellite tv a dvd player and set them up with internet in the home and almost anything they need.

Prisca is the housekeeper, she does our laundry and irons it (completely pressed and folded, including the underwear), does the grocery shopping (market shopping really), cleans and cooks dinner on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. This week Tuesday we went to the convent so she didn’t, and today is Women’s Day so she won’t be cooking dinner tonight I don’t think.

Monday was mashed potatoes made into large potato shaped things ha ha ha. And steamed vegetables put with tons of oil. Oh I did tell this somewhere..

Okay gotta get ready for women’s day.

Dinner at the Convent - March 6th

March 6^th

I finished updating the excel file of patients with HIV including all of the RIP and transfers that had been written all over the printed out old document. That took until about 10:30 am. I couldn’t find MacDonald to figure out what else he would like me to do so I helped Lillian and Quinta with finding the patients files on the shelves labeled by year. Inside the patients little booklet of medical history is their patient number written down.. NCH – 156 – 07 would mean I look under the year 2007 on the shelf then look for number 156. And that’s where the HIV medical history and prescription information is kept.

Nothing is private here, from bathing to men urinating on the side of the road to medical information and treatment. Anyone can be in the room and it’s not confidential at all. The HIV patients receive their prescriptions in the same little room (the size of like a Moses Lake Clinic exam room) and the door is open.  Lillian, Ajam and Quinta are all talking with patients at the same time in there, and Lillian is counting and cutting pills in half right there on the same table.

In the hospital there are posters for washing hands that read:

“Wash your hands before eating and after shitting.”

That’s just how it’s said here. Shitting.

Yesterday after I couldn’t find Mac I ate lunch with Terry, Jim and my dad (left over soup basically, chicken broth left over spaghetti noodles and vegetables from the two meals before).  Then I still couldn’t find Mac so I went walking with my camera, “strolling” as they call it here. One lady called up from the cook house below the walk way and said hello and asked how I was. I started walking down a little path towards the area and she called me down to see her. I took her picture, (I’ll try to post when I have internet that is good enough) and she told me she had just had twins and was staying in the cookhouse until she could pay the medical bill to leave. She took me over to see her babies so I took a picture of her babies with her mother, as well as another woman with her baby. There were so many people down there and they all wanted to see the photos after I took them. They really like to have their pictures taken! Especially the kids.  The woman who brought me down to the cook house was talking to me and reached up to get hair out of my face.

It’s such a different world. 

The afternoon was just kind of lazy, no internet either so we kind of just hung out. Terry plays a lot of spider solitaire on her computer.

We also went to the sisters for dinner, over at the convent. We walked in and greeted many of them and then they sang “Welcome To You” together and clapped. It was very cute. They fed us salad made of lettuce, carrots sliced onion and tomatoes; I stuck with the lettuce and carrots (which doesn’t follow the rules, “peel it, boil it…”). Well first Sister Relindus (from Austria but has been here since 1963) served us each some sort of vegetable like soup and then the salad and then there was chicken (on the bone but I ate it), potatoes (which were basically fries not fried up as much),  and some steamed and oiled vegetables (carrots green beens potatoes… basically what everything is). They also served us a roll cake thing at the end. And of course only the 4 of us, Sister Xaveria, and Relindus ate it, the rest ate other food.

Came back and went to bed.

I Became the Patient For a Few Minutes - March 4th

Sunday is the day of rest, so doctors don’t even do rounds on the patients, but Jim does anyways and they are used to him doing it by now.

So Sunday rounds Terry is Jim’s nurse so they invited me to come along as well for the time if I could handle it.

Now of course the people who stay overnight are in wards and all the men in one room, women in another, children in another. It’s just beds lined up along the walls, with about 2 feet in between each. The family is responsible for taking care of the food, bathing, taking them to the restroom or helping with bed pans for the patient. There is a cookhouse and a little canteen where food is available to buy or they can make food, as well as a small market on the grounds of the hospital.

We went through the hospital starting in the pediatrics. There were 3 children and babies, one girl had had heart surgery somewhere else and was here for I am not sure what but she is very very sleepy and can’t move very well on her own, she is 8. There were also two little girls with pneumonia, baby age. Very cute and afraid of Jim (mainly cause he is white).

Then we went to the mens ward with about 10 patients or more. Some very very sick, some less sick. One passed away last night (I’m not sure who). There were many with HIV and other various infections and diseases and a man with lung cancer. Of course they can’t do anything for someone with something like lung cancer here. Also one man was having a lot of pain in his back and was there to stay until he was better. I generally just stood around and talked to Terry while Jim and my dad talked about the patients and how to care and what to do with each patient.

At the very last patient in the mens ward it hit me really fast. Between an antibiotic on an empty stomach, jet lag and travelling anxiety, the heat, smells and the realization that I’m in Africa in a hospital looking at patients who are extremely ill and all of the standing in between patients I “krumped” as Terry called it. Within 15 seconds I went from fine to feeling like shaky to losing my vision and hearing. Somehow my dad and Terry and Jim walked me out of the ward and to the sidewalk outside where I had to lay down on the cement and recover. It was the exact same thing that happened when I got my yellow fever shot, I just almost passed out. I think it was just too much at once on an empty stomach.

So Terry and I came back to the house and about 12 we made lunch, eggs with potatoes and onions a couple pieces of bacon and some fruit.

In the afternoon we walked to the main street of Njinikom, passed homes and people and everything again. It was about a mile walk and we stopped to buy bottled water (for my dad and I, not sure if I want to drink the water here or not, Jim and Terry have always), spaghetti noodles and tomatoes. We also stopped for a beer at their favorite place where its on the second story so we can watch the people. The beer was 23 ounces and it costs 600 francs or $1.20. So can’t hardly afford not to drink! It was a warm german style lighter colored beer. Not bad. We watched the women prepare for Women’s Day Thursday all in their traditional outfits and all the many passerbys.

Basically anything goes here, people wear everything from Obama tee shirts to pokemon to fake name brands in the US, along with traditional clothing, very European style jeans. Men wear women’s clothing, women wear men’s clothing. They don’t really know that a blouse is gender specific. I mean everything you can imagine, fancy sparkles all day long, dirty old clothes.. you never know.

If you want to know more about the patients you can follow Jim and Terry’s blog, hakesincameroon.blogspot.com