A year in

Rainy season has come and gone, and I think I’m going to miss it. It made little things like crossing the riverbed such an adventure. It brought me the fruits of my gardening labor, five cucumbers and two cantaloupes. It also brought me a touch of malaria. I’ve still got some things to look forward to, though. I’m getting trained to be a prenatal consultant at the hospital and I’m working on a couple different grants, one to dig wells and another to train peer educators in HIV/AIDS prevention. Also, I’ve started weighing babies regularly at the hospital and so far have only been peed on once.

I’ve been in this country a year now, but I’m still always learning. Here are a couple examples . . .

My counterpart Falta is without a doubt my best friend in Kolofata. I have spent far more time with her and her family than anyone else in my village, so it’s funny how we still learn things about each other all the time. The other day, I was sitting on a mat with her daughters, when little Yanama took my glasses off. I said something like “Ah, I can’t see!”, which would seem like a normal enough response, but this threw Falta through a loop. She’s said “Hold up, you wear those so you can see?” I tried to explain that I can only see about as far as my arm can stretch and tried to show with a bizarre hand gesture what “blurry” looks like because I don’t know the word “blurry” in French. She thought I’d been wearing my oddly shaped magnifying glass-like specs for fashion purposes. Then she asked if that’s why so many of the other volunteers wear glasses too. I was so surprised at first, but Falta was making complete sense. The hospital in Kolofata is one of three in this half of the country with ophthalmologists, and people come here and pay lots of money for surgery for blinding diseases like trachoma, not for silly reasons like “I can’t read the blackboard.” But now I really wonder how many kids can’t read the blackboard. Ah, cultural exchange.

Last week, I heard a man walking on my roof . It was early in the afternoon when I hide from the heat and sit in front of my fan. I stepped into the blinding light, confused and really hoping he wasn’t a Nigerian bandit. It turned out to be my neighbor, and he kept repeating the same phrase to try to explain what he was doing “C’est un varang.” “It’s a what?” He then jumped down from my roof and into my yard holding what looked like a baby komodo dragon. A varang is a giant lizard that lives in the bush (and apparently is quite tasty). So it’s ok my neighbor climbed onto my roof because my scrappy little dog McLovin would have tried to take on the varang, but wouldn’t have stood a chance against it.