My Day, Plain and Simple (Tuesday, February 19, 2008)

Today I went by myself, but with a driver, to collect samples from our newest village. It's about one bumpy hour away, and is the village of our translator. We held a workshop there two Thursdays ago, and today was the first time collecting samples. Actually our translator, who is an extremely involved, dedicated filter person put on the workshop. We used it as an opportunity to gauge our own success, through his ability to be successful at holding a workshop.

There had been no new filters built, as no one managed to get pipe. Pipe is only found in the town I live in or farther away. Either way, there were two working filters, and a lot of really good vibes. I also helped to build another filter, although nearly all the prep work had been done, and we simply had to assemble the thing. After assembling the filter, we were fed breakfast bread and chai. It was sort of special for me, because I usually avoid eating on surveys. I have almost 20 houses in each of the other villages, and could not complete my work in a day if I ate at half my houses.

We then went to a non-filter home, which is what we use as our control group. It was the most amazing thing ever, the woman was a local midwife. She showed me her record book. It was where she recorded the date, mother's name and village, baby's name, and something in a column labeled "dead." I only looked at the first page, but of about 15 - 25 entrys, in the dead column all but three were vertical hash marks, one was a horizontal hash, and two were blank. I asked what the horizontal hash meant, and the translator said that the baby lived. So it sounds like all but one, or three, of her first 20 recorded patients died. Wow! Although that was in 1989. I really wanted to take a picture (we use our camera as a photocopier) of every single page. Anyway, on that first page she had about ten babies a month. In the survey, I found out that she had attended no school, and delivered her own children herself.

There was even a very pregnant lady just wondering around the room for a while. She picked up a pile of dried leaves and went out. I just wanted to stay and ask questions, but we finished the rest of the surveys and went home.

When I got home, I found that Ausubuhi had sliced his hand at school, and had to get stitches. Apparently he did it in the morning, but couldn't get stitches for six hours because his stomach had to be empty for the anesthesia. So he was totally passed out and everyone was just watching him. So I walked over to the lab to prep my seven samples (that was easy compared to the usual 45 samples).

Unfortunately, when I took the agar out of the autoclave, it didn't look quite right. So I swirled it a little, which broke the surface tension, making it erupt and land all over my hand. I wiped it off, and it felt fine, but about five minutes later it was soooooo painful. It was also bright pink, because there is red and blue die in the agar. Everyone who saw my hand said, "Wow, that's bad."

Later that evening I went to see the little guy, and he was starting to wake up. They had a matress in the middle of the living room for him, and I lied there with Sara and him. Otherwise, he kept wanting to get up, which didn't seem to work so well. Anyway we got the first laugh out of him, when we played the "pull open each others closed eyelids" game. Then, when the generator got turned on, we watched Al Jazeera, the BBC of the Middle East. He fell asleep on my lap and drooled all over my leg.

On Wednesday, it was back to the same old. We went to a village to collect samples and source water. My hand was so burnt that I had to wrap it a bit to avoid the pain from the Sun.

I got extremely annoyed when we met a child that Daniel told me was not in school because she didn't have the right color shoes at the moment. He told me it was just a rule. I explained to him that I could understand the rule if she had them, but chose not to wear them; but not having them means she can't wear them, so why shouldn't she go to school?

Back in town, the power had been off since Sunday morning. That was definitely a record for me, over three days. It's easy to live without power (minus blogging, which I do from my phone), but working without power is another story. Sarah and I agreed that we would be able to do the source waters after another visit (many of the source water tests require a spectrophotometer), but we were able, and going, to do the household samples. It was disappointing, but we decided it wasn't so bad. Just as we were finishing the tests, the electricity came back on. We started the source water tests, and were in the lab until midnight, again.