La vida frustration...

Nissawah! Amahorro y Mwiri weh!

All good things…our vocabulary is slowly expanding. As is our diet! We have just learned how to cook Chipati out on our fire! And it was delicious. It was a great experience to just spend the evening interacting with the locals and learning how to be productive and domesticated in a completely different culture. I am AMAZED at how these women can stay so close to burning fires and not melt! It gave me a much bigger appreciation for the hard work it is to just make a meal like beans, rice, and fried cabbage!

The past few days have been filled with mountains and valleys of experiences. Just amazing how our reactions fluctuate in a twenty four hour period. I’ll admit I’m mostly the one fluctuating, and Kenton stays as always, solid like a rock, with a permanent positive outlook. That is why I love him! We spent the last two days working in the clinic seeing patients together. Today was the prenatal care day and it was really a great session of teaching and asking questions for the ladies. Very interesting to watch and see how they view relationships, their understanding of where do babies actually come from? And there endless desire to have as many babies as God will give them. I have been asked the same questions often, and have been advised to have at least twenty children…We will have to see about that!

Kenton and I had some very interesting cases today. Primarily one of a young girl who presented with nephritic syndrome, It was a big diagnosis on Kenton’s behalf. Tomorrow we will teach our first session to the nurses on the Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses. It will be an introductory class in which we hopefully we build strong relationships with the nurses and mostly learn about their lives, their interests, and their experiences as nurses.

My mom continues to advise me to sit back and soak in the culture and way of life here. As a westerner, I am often chomping at the bit to jump in, change, improve, be a task master and see results. Here, the goals are similar, just the road to getting there is much more relaxed and go with-the-flowish…I am learning. Mostly to be still and just be rather then fight my way through the day feeling my own lack of productivity. A horrible feeling. But mostly, a waste of precious time. Time which Kenton has reminded me I could delight in knowing we were together 24/7 on the greatest adventure of our lives. A time when we could just read, and study, and make ourselves open to help in any way, rather than in specific ways that demonstrate our own personal objectives. I was reminded today in a reading that every task , no matter how menial or insignificant is the task we should be gladly doing with our best effort. Therefore, I washed our underwear in the sink and felt glad. We are learning!


That’s all for now…Kenton needs to start restudying his French Rosetta Stone again!