rainy days

Monday:

my first day at the health center.  ahhhhh :) sitting between Scott and the mother/sick kids and listening to his questions and their answers...asking a few of my own and recording the answers...and of course the pinching of cheeks and trying to make kids smile - with more success than I am used to from Bundibugyo...not as many shrieks and squirms of fear as I'm used to - instead of "white coat syndrome" it's more like "white skin syndrome" :)

a lot of the usual fever (which actually just translates "the body is hot"), diarrhea, vomiting, cold symptoms, etc.  and then 2 kids with marked swelling...malnutrition? kidney disease? other rheumatoid/auto-immune diseases?  what to do when the only labs you can do are a malaria test (positive or negative - no numeric parasite counts), a urine dip, and a stool culture...glad for now to be just listening :)  no solving of problems yet for me, only listening to the arabic being used and trying to use the little I have as much as I can while learning more.  It's nice, I can understand Scott's Arabic more than I can most Sudanese, so it helps me to then pick out some of the same words in their Arabic thereby improving my ability to understand their Arabic as well.  Quite a nice system if I do say so myself.

We'd said we'd leave at 1:30pm.  Around 2pm the thunder and dark clouds roll in and I grab the keys and high tail it back to Scott's hoping to pick up my bike and ride back home in time for my 2:30pm skype date with Carrie Jo...but I didn't high tail it quite fast enough and the rain caught me at Scott's.  What does one do when it starts to rain?  You sit and wait.  Wherever it is that you find yourself, you sit and wait.  I called Care and told her I was stuck in the rain and wasn't going to make it back to internet access in time.  We rescheduled.  I stole a few bites of Andrew's granola, a couple bites of Scott's cinnamon/butterscotch cake yumminess leftover from team worship/prayer the night before...plopped myself on the couch and waited.

Scott came back around 2:30pm and didn't skip a beat before jumping into "host" mode...what do you do when you're stuck in a bachelor's house during a rain storm?  You eat Ramen noodles :)  Beef was the flavor choice of the day.

What do you do when it's 3:15pm and it's still raining?  You have a cup of tea.  In this bachelor's house you're not at all stunned to find tea options like the Christmas Sugar Cookie Celestial Seasonings which happened to be my choice.  Never caught dead sitting in one place for more than a half hour at a time unless under duress, when you have Scott Will trapped in a room with little opportunity to flee, you also probe the depths of his rarely shared inner thought/emotional life and actually get some answers :)
In all seriousness though, just as the rain slows the already slow pace of African life, it also slows us Americans down and I'm really thankful for the significant conversations and pauses it gives us opportunity for.

5pm and I hear a pause in the pitter patter of the rain on the mubati roof, I decided to make the move and attempt to bike home before the next cloud moved in...and I made it.  Turned out that was the ONLY pause in the rain from 2pm until who knows when it stopped during the night...but what does 3 hours of rain mean for dirt roads?  Mud.  I was very well adorned by the time I reached home (see photo above).  And I never saw it but I could feel that my backside was pretty well mudded as well and the laughs that broke out from most every person I passed on my bike let me know I was not mistaken :)  Happy to provide everyone with a good rain pause laugh :)