Today began with sleeping in till 6am and then biking to the hospital. Priscilla and I just got our own bikes to use on Saturday and we are super pumped cause now we aren’t so dependent on the Harvey’s or the other missionaries to get places. By the time we made it to the hospital at 7 we were drenched in sweat. Before coming to Africa people would always say to me “you’re going to be so tan when you get back!” and I thought the same thing. When I think Africa I think hot jungles and deserts with lots of wild animals roaming the plains. I also think of people with dark skin, so it would all make sense that I would somehow come back from Congo super tan. Wrong. I have gotten paler and paler each day here. Yes it is very very hot and humid, almost 100 percent humidity all the time. Everything is sticky and hot. But it isn’t sunny, 80% of the time it is overcast here. So I will unfortunately come back looking whiter than when I left. Mundeli!

This week Priscilla and I are scheduled to work in the Bloc. The Bloc is where surgeries take place, so Bloc = Operating Rooms (OR). We will hopefully be scrubbing into a few surgeries tomorrow and help out as much as we can! We would have scrubbed in today but there were no surgeries to be done. The hospital is a little slow right now, mostly people with chronic illnesses that we comfort and surgery recovery patients. So since there were no surgeries we followed Dr. Wegner on rounds. We started in the ER. There were a few interesting patients there, one man had broken his wrist and insisted that he didn’t want it repositioned or splinted, he just wanted a massage. Sometimes the patients crack us up here because they won’t want to pay the money for something that could so easily fix their problem! We finally convinced the man (through reversed psychology) that he should go to the Bloc to have a splint put on, and he actually got up and started walking there. But somewhere between the ER and the Bloc he changed his mind and left, because we never saw him again. Another interesting and slightly uncomfortable situation was when we had to check on a women that had been admitted to the hospital due to “lunatic behavior” (ßher actual diagnosis haha).  She was scary. When we walked into her room she started yelling strange things, and pulling at her face and sticking her tongue out and staring at us all bug-eyed. We didn’t really know what to do, and the doctors didn’t do anything either. Apparently Congolese women tend to act crazy when they feel really sick so that people will take them to the hospital. They put on a whole show and often dramatically fall off their motorcycles when they reach the ER! It is hilarious. Obviously we know they are probably sick to some degree, but we are aware that their drama is just a cultural thing too. The women have to play-up their sickness, or else their man will not bring them to the hospital. So we all had this little cultural fact in the back of our minds when we went to see this woman with “lunatic behavior.” She was different than the other sick ladies, she wasn’t whaling, thrashing, sweating, or holding onto her hurting body part; she was just odd. At one point when the lady was saying weird things in Lingala Dr. Wegner leaned over and whispered to me that she was saying “I want to tear off the head of the blonde girl.” He was joking, just trying to freak me out, but if he hadn’t told me he was joking I would have totally believed him haha.

The rest of the day was pretty lazy. Priscilla, Millie, Sarah, and I made cookies and took some naps in the Samoutou’s house (they are a missionary family that have been on sabbatical for the last 6 months but are coming back on Wednesday). The Samoutou’s have a really nice house—relatively speaking—it has fans, a TV, a working fridge, 24/7 power, and two working toilets! Wahoo! I know people always say, “it’s the little things,” but seriously, in Africa that cliché applies to everything. Examples:

1)    The only showers are cold showers, but I wouldn’t want anything else in this hot hot weather.

2)    Finding ground beef in a can is an accomplishment at the market, I know that sounds gross, but it makes every meal so much better and keeps you feeling full for longer.

3)    Egg-less pancakes with syrup flavored water, incredibly delicious, seriously.

4)    When an email that has pictures attached sends in under 4 hours! That means I can send two emails with pictures during one day working at the hospital (the only place with Wifi), it’s incredible and has only happened once so far. Today it took 9 hours for an email with 5 pictures attached to send, but it still sent!!

5)    The fact that I have only had to kill 2 cockroaches while living in my house.

6)    Any drink that is cold (refrigerators are rare cause they use kerosene to run which is expensive and time consuming to pump into the fridge).

Blessings come in all shapes and sizes.

After working at the hospital Priscilla and I returned to the Mission and got changed so that I could run for a little while she biked next to me. This is the first time I have run during the day time, so Congolese life was in full swing. I literally ran past people practicing karate on the side of the street, how random! They even had different colored belts on and the full pajama pants with robe get-up! After my run we came back and showered and then spontaneously decided to head back to the hospital grounds to have a sleepover with Sarah and Millie at their guesthouses there! When we arrived they were beginning to prepare dinner and said that they were having Dr. Noah and a nurse named Anderson over for dinner too. So Priscilla and I decided to bike to a nearby food stand to buy onions, bread, and cokes to add to the meal. It was a delicious hodge-podge dinner and Dr. Noah and Anderson were super fun too! Dr. Noah knows a good bit of English if you talk slow enough for him to understand (he says girls are the worst to try to understand because they speak way to fast), so it is always a good time talking to him!

Now we are getting ready for bed, (but not before Sarah gives me a massage that she promised me). Also, Priscilla is waking up at 4am to Skype her beloved boyfriend Daaaavid, so we figured sleeping at the hospital would be better than waking up at 3:30am to bike there.

Well goodnight friends!