Grr says the Red Panda
On a rainy Monday, am I allowed to be slightly more pissy than usual? One should hope. This morning I arrived at the holiday camp that I’m working with, and my partner was late. Due to scholarships and lagging enrollment, right now, over half the participants are deaf. Which is cool, if I was working with a deaf school, but a mixed group (with lesson plans of not hearing-impaired-friendly activities) is really hard. Simon says and the hokey pokey are a bit less… well-received. When I asked the kids to introduce themselves and give one adjective for how they were feeling, I got things like “bored”, “weak”, “tired”… Awesome. Roll with the punches, we’ve got to do more visual activities and work on our translation.
Last Friday I took the kids to the clinic. ["the kids" are 2 of a family with many kids that I've grown close with through other volunteers] It was supposed to be a simple, “these kids need care and I’m going to take them to get it” sort of deal. One had ringworm and intestinal worms and the other thought she had filaria. It’s not sustainable, but I knew the family wouldn’t take them so… Neither of them had really ever been to a clinic before, so taking blood was a bit shocking. The boy, who’s 4, is anaemic and so had to be stuck with a needle in 6 places before they went for the femoral artery to try and get blood. The doctor called me into the office and said “He needs a transfusion.” I nearly laughed out loud. There are no blood banks here, so that means that you have to leave the clinic and franticly search for someone with the same “blood group”. He needs it because he has malaria and it’s destroying the red blood cells he has and he’s grown anaemic to the point where he doesn’t just need iron-he needs hemoglobin. So, knowing that he won’t get the transfusion (his parents aren’t around), we got him on some medicines and the family’s supposed to make “blood mixtures” (mixtures to thicken the blood, one recipe being grenadine and tomato paste.. which sounds terrible and I have no idea if it works). As we left the clinic, after I’d spent $60 (which is not too bad considering all the medicines we bought and the tests they ran on the 2 of them), I started to analyze why I’d brought them at all. Would they take the medicines? (A lot of Cameroonians don’t really like taking medicines) If they don’t get better nutrition, won’t it just happen again? I left feeling lost and depressed. Furthermore, the family wasn’t really all that appreciative. When we came back, after being in the clinic for 5 hours, one of the female heads of the family came up to us in the street and said “Wow! You guys have really been enjoying!”… as if we’d been out in restaurants, partying?! Lesson learned: don’t do it if it’s not sustainable. Money’s not everything.
Update on the rainy season: I’m fighting a war against mold. Leather apparently LOVES mold (who knew rotting flesh wasn’t good for moisture?). My clothes are beginning to show spots of it. I can’t stand it. So the electrician’s coming in the morning to put a light bulb in my closet that I’ll run all the time to keep the temperature up. You would’ve thought growing up in 100% humid NC would give me some preparation for this, but this is unbelievable. What I do like is cuddling up in sweatshirts and having a need of a tobagan (weird word and no I don’t mean the sled).
Ok and to wrap up with something beautiful… the baby in my compound, Junior (there’s a gazillion Juniors here), is I think about a year and half. He knows words like “cat” and “mama” (which he screams repeatedly whenever upset). Today he started saying what sounds like my name – although “Jess” isn’t too hard and gives him a step up to saying “yes”, I’m still pleased. So I held him and he faintly smiled. Babies here don’t laugh as much as babies that I remember, so when they do, you take note of it (which may be a good thing, not to take such pure joy for granted). We danced …which looks a little like me doing a drunk booty dance and he getting his arms yanked around to my lack of rhythm.
