Picture day...or not?

This looks funny because of a mac-windows transfer problem. Suffice it to say, ì = first ", Ö=!, î= ending ", í='. You'll live. I'll fix it up later. When I don't have to sleep 20 minutes ago. OK, I lied again. I can get pics to show up yet. Very spotty internet. Suffice it to say that I have the pics I claim to, and will put them in when I am able. Have fun imagining what the pics I have look like. Good night.

Fixed the typos, but I am loath to delete anything in the blog...I'd rather just put a line through the words...any internet gurus out there that wanna tell me how to do that? Oh and again too lazy to figure the picture thing out.

Well apparently the general chorus that I am hearing from your comments is a small “cool you arrived safe” and a big “where are the pictures you promised!” Thanks, I love you guys too. Well since I have trouble doing anything halfway, you will get your pictures, oh you will get them. More than you ever dreamed possible…OK well there’s only 20ish, but that’s a lot. You’re welcome. Jerks.

Let’s start with the basics; here are pics of my parents who funded this whole enterprise. I’m sorry, but they really aren’t very photogenic, and the best I could manage was the devil-eyed father and my mom puffing up. Seriously, you don’t want to see the other pics I had.

Here is a quick pic I took of the travel in in Joburg, (South Africa) not the nicest of places but it was very good considering all I was expecting was a bed. (It had 2 beds, some clean water you could heat up for coffee or tea, and a bathroom all to meself)

And here is what the different gates look like at Joburg. Pretty simple I thought. Oh, and by the way, there were only 3ish gate rooms in international departures, as big as the one in the pic and yet the airport was still as large as a normal one. How? Lots. And Lots. And Lots. (Yes the L is capitalized for a reason.) Of shops. It was turn here for gates A 7-50…then you walked past no less than 20 shops. Only one of which was food. And then you turn left, down an escalator, and bam! A 10-30, all in one room. No pic in Blantyre, too concerned with the whole one month thing. Which someone cleared up for me by the way. They want me to pay to stay longer. And I have two choices. Pay, Or go to out of country for a day, come back, and let them stamp me for free again.

Here’s a bunch of Blantyre from the compound, The first is one at night, with all the fires lighting up the mountain. The camera missed a bunch by the way. There is a whole hell of a lot more fires than just that. The next one is as close up as I could get to the soccer field. (Which is by the way, very, very uneven.) And a mountain pic, and a pic of Blantyre in the day.

Here are the two giant spiders that reside under one of our canopies. Me like. They big. Probably eat mosquitoes. And also, the walls with lights on them are crawling with geckos at night. Another think I found cool.

Here’s a cool Gazebo thing on the compound. I don’t think it gets used very much. Tis’ a shame eh?

And random pics of the compound. Also, the tree has some fruits on it. NO idea what kind. They can be whatever you want them to be.

Here is the down house. (Correction from bottom house) The computer I’m sending it on in down house. And the chair I dozed off in for about two hours while waiting for Gene and Vegas to get back. (More on that later.) Oh and the cool out of scale drawing of the sites we work at. The red ones we are going to, and the blue ones are old sites.

So. I woke up at 7ish (shut up mom and dad) and eat breakfast (cereal). Did some random crap (Reading, talking. And other stuff not important enough for me to remember.) We left early though to go see downtown Blantyre. (which by the way you will probably never see pics of. I will NOT go running around with an expensive camera. I also wont go running around like I'm some tourist.) We found the best exchange rate locally, (160ish Kwatcha per dollar) and hit up the market. Boy that was weird. I got accosted by EVERYONE. “Here, I give you good price.” “This small, you take with you, I give you good price.” Three in particular were the most aggressive. Chaps, Francis, and Kevin (I know their names because they told it to me 3-4 times in hope than when I come back I would remember them.) Chaps actually game me a bracelet as a gift. My roomie got a small figurine.

After that we went to the supermarket to pick up something for a little girl. She had been picked up at one of their chiponde (the peanut butter) clinics. Her dress had caught on fire, and she had burns all over her body. And in the hospitals they don’t give pain medication after the first couple days. And for burns, they have to rub, no, SCRUB the skin off. So we bought some fruit chews and some M&M’s. I hope she likes them. He mentioned that he remembered something about her “not having teeth.” Heavy.

After that, we had lunch, and waited for two of the local stool study workers to get back. Now, I need to give you a little back story here. Project peanut butter, in addition to feeding the malnourished children, is running two experiments right now. One is called the stool study, and the other is the Chiponde/Soya study. Milk is the most expensive and hard to get ingredient of the chiponde, (flown in from South Africa) so a study is being conducted to see if the milk content can be lowered from 25% to 10%, or just replaced with soy. The merely moderately malnourished children are given soy, and the severe cases are given either a 25% or 10%. If the study shows that soy or 10% is as effective, then they will switch to that kind, and will be able to produce more chiponde.

The stool study is attempting to figure out the causes of the two different kinds of malnutrition “cases.” As none of the med students are on hand, I cannot name them, but one causes severe emaciation, and the other causes swelling and the large gut protrusion. They use twins, as in many cases two twins under similar circumstances may develop the two differing conditions, and it is as close to the same person as you can get. Since the different conditions are supposed to be caused by different bacteria in the bowel, stool is collected from each child participating in the study. We get them to come by giving mothers “incentives” every time they come. The incentives consist of beans, sugar, oil, and other things that mothers would otherwise have to sell their crops to afford.

So we waited from one to four for them to return, with me falling asleep in the big, comfy, *yawn,* chair. Once they got here though, we spent a good hour or so restocking the materials for the next week. Most of which was spent taping lining into the diapers for the stool study. The three other med students on sabbatical arrived partway through that. So after we just ate, talked and chilled in the up house. Tomorrow I get up early, and out the door by 5. First day of work. Wish me luck!