Desert Gills

We have less than 10 small solar powered hearing aides, but its often hard to find a good candidate for them.  They don't always work for a patients' condition, or patients have trouble maintaining them.   But this woman was my one real success story with them.  When we put in her hearing aide 3 months ago, her face lit up.  She had been unable to carry on a conversation when I first met her, but when she returned from our ear/eye suite, she was grinning at me and easily hearing what I said.  I also saw her a few weeks later in the waiting room, with her aide set snugly under her mayafi and in place.  She chatted with me comfortably    Of course, its always hard to keep technology working here.  She returned last week with the machine no longer working.  I am not sure what the problem was, nor do we have the technical expertise to do much investigation.  This is always the problem with biomedical tech here...

Yes, I know many churches get little palm frond strips, but how many rent their own donkey? Interestingly, I went with a group on a good news outing to a village a couple hours from here yesterday.  The kind of off-the-beaten-track place where I hold out my hand to greet a flock of 3 year olds and they scatter in petrified fear, eye-ing the 'Nasarawa' with terror.  As my partner shared something about the Prince of Peace, he illustrated by pointing to a passing donkey, "When you see donkeys, you know the village is at peace.  But if horses are present, you know there's an issue."  I had to interrupt him to ask what he meant, but he and his listener both understood it: before cars, horses were the means that colonial and even tribal officials would use to inspect a village, collect taxes, etc.  One of them commented that often at the sight of horses, townspeople would hide or be...

Sports is not a huge deal here.  Most of our patients are village people who totally are not into it.  Among our staff, soccer is significant, but traditional wrestling gets the most 'buzz' around the hospital.  Once a year, there's a big tournament , where 8 of the country's regions send 10 wrestlers each.  If a wrestlers knee touches the ground, he's out... and it goes for a week until tomorrow the undefeated wrestler takes the champion's sword.

Some of our friends here are a family with 4 children each lining, up by age (within a year) and gender with our 4. Very thoughtful of them! Here's A with her alter ego, S. Speaking of my little sister (#3), she was recently reminiscing about our family's infamous and short-lived 'hot cereal phase of 1992.' Naturally having married a frugal and healthy woman, we have hot cereal several mornings a week. I don't seem to have been able to come up with a counter-argument to 'its cheap and good for you.' And it helps me feel kinship with my neighbors... they typically are eating a cream of wheat type food or else 'tuwo.' This is absolutely a staple around here, and is well explained by a recent post from some friends .