Desert Gills

This is M at the nurse's station. Usually I show up a little after 8am to round on the inpatients I cover... so inpatient rounds can take a half hour or go well past 10. At the end of inpatient rounds I sit here and write out discharge meds and that sort of thing. The rest of the day is at the other end of the hospital where we see outpatients until 6pm.

We were struck that we had never seen a piece of playground equipment like this in the states and concluded afterwards that there must be liability issues. This isn't even at Ir's new favorite playground... two houses down from us on the compound.

Ir: "I put them on all by myself and the writing in back!!!" Whats she talking about? Of course its underwear. She is very proud of her growing self-dressing capabilities. We did get a kick out of another recent question though. She was putting on new hand-me-down pajamas a pattern of silouettes of horses. She asked if they were lizards. I guess she has a lot more experience of those... lizards are everywhere around here.

Because there are so many compound kids we all decided to celebrate the New Year at Midnight Pakistani time. Thats my kind of crowd! Noisemakers and holiday appropriate sparklies provided by some fun short-termers...

We thank God our friends survived this tragic accident. You can imagine our shock at coming on the scene.

We are so grateful for our hard-working house helper, Adama. She helps us in everything from hand-washing clothes and dishes, to peeling veggies, and has been a real delight: she often sings while she works and relates well with our kids. Though we have to admit that Ir does still garble things in various languages... she's often been heard calling her "our Hausa helper," "Obama."