Ringtones

It is not all sunshine and roses here. OK, well it is all sunshine, but I do want to mention some of the not-so-glorious aspects of life here since someone mentioned that it sounds like I’m having a “heavenly” time. I just tend to focus on the positive. Don’t read these and think I’m all depressed, I love it here and these are very minor inconveniences.

-Dogs howling to the call to prayer. Every. Single. Day.

-A huge variety of insects are available for close inspection here. Bugs in your food, bugs in your hair, bugs in your water, bugs everywhere. Before I came here I had only mosquito bite this year. I have now broken my all-time record for bug bites.

-The water here is not clean. Hence the loads of patients seen with awful GI diseases. We filter all the water we drink, cook with, or brush our teeth with. There is a really cool project here where children admitted to the hospital with GI illnesses are provided with a water filter for home use.

People here without wells have to walk to get water, sometimes far distances because the city water may not be on that day to their nearest spigot. Some people just walk a long distance and draw from the lake. Which is nasty. There are dozens of young men who carry 5 or 6 large jerry cans on bicycles and spend all day walking their bikes back and forth and selling water. One day on the drive to work there was a ditch full of water and 3 women were scooping it out into pots and pans. Speaking of city water; it gets pumped to your house or spigot at different times of the day for varying amounts of time. So your washing machine may or may not work (which depends on if the power is on or off anyways. Sometimes it’s hard to get both the water and the power coordinated.) When the city water isn’t on we still have water, it just has no pressure and a small stream. Washing dishes takes ages, and it is almost futile to try and wash your hair. When the city water isn’t on the toilets at work don’t flush, so you have to tote water from across the hospital campus to fill up the toilet tank. The bucket that goes in the staff bathroom is pink, so that’s always fun.

-Plumbing is a problem. There is a lot of magnesium in the water here and pipes just bust constantly. My hosts know more about plumbing now then the local plumbers and have replaced at least 3 parts in the past 2 weeks. My ear is now finely tuned to know if a toilet will run within just seconds of flushing. I’ve ghetto rigged my shower piping myself already a time or two with some zip ties.

-Dratted ringtones. The most annoying thing I have encountered here is stupid ringtones of songs I disliked on the radio in America and never expected to hear in this place. They follow you everywhere and haunt your dreams. Though walking down a dirt road with destitute people and hearing “Fancy” blaring is kind of fun. Also, everyone’s text alerts aren’t just sounds, they’re songs. I can identify staff members simply by the sounds because everyone texts here constantly and never turns the sounds off, even in staff meeting. I even know some of the patients or family members’ ringtones quite well. People answer their phones while in conversation with patients, while in meetings, while pushing IV drugs.

-Length of time needed to cook. You can literally spend all day preparing dinner. For example, say you want to make hamburgers. You have to bake the buns from scratch, so you spend all morning preparing the dough and making those. It can take while to go to the market. You have to soak your tomatoes in iodine. You have to grind the beef yourself. It just takes a long time. We pasteurize our own milk and make our own yoghurt. We cut our own pineapple. If you buy pork you buy a huge chunk of it and cut it yourself. You want spaghetti sauce? Make it yourself. Etc, etc. It’s not bad, there just no fast food. You have to prepare ahead.

-People yell at each other a lot. It's completely acceptable to raise your voice at someone here. Patients yell at each other, at each others' children, at the staff. Staff yell at each other and patients. Shop owners yell at each other. Drivers yell at walkers. Walkers yell at bikers. Bikers yell at the shop owners, who probably yelled at the patients... I hate it. Can't we all just be friends?

-No AC. The only AC I have felt since arriving in Africa has been in the pharmacy store room at the hospital. I discovered this fact last Friday. I walked in to ask for dispensing bags and was so shocked I said “It’s COLD in here!” and the pharmacy tech started laughing at me. Anyways, I like being warm so it doesn’t generally bother me. There are times however, where it becomes quite toasty in the ward when there’s no wind at all because the fans don’t work. Also, I often wake up in the middle of the night burning up because the power has gone off for a while and the fans went off.

I tore the following article out of a magazine years ago and there’s no author on it so I can’t reference it properly, so I hope none of my former professors read this.

“The biggest lesson I am learning in ---- is not perfecting the bucket shower, or finding more energy to greet every person I see, or finding ways to sleep in sticky weather, or how to work with children and foster parents, or even understanding this culture. The lesson I am learning is that Jesus is everything. When relationships are broken, when I am tired and have no strength, when there seems to be no answers, when I want to give up, when I feel joy or pain, when I face uncertainty about the future, I must seek Jesus. Everything is about Jesus and His plans, His desires, and His passions. This life in --- is extremely difficult, but the crazy thing about it is from this position I know Him in ways I have never known Him before. “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one died for all, therefore all have died; and He died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).