You’re Canadian, you shouldn’t be cold!

July 26, 2012

Yep, you guessed it – I’m freezing right now.  I’d love to actually see what the temperature is;, it’s probably around 20 degrees would be my guess.  It’s been raining a lot in the past few weeks, almost every day for several hours.  I walk about twenty minutes through a swamp and market to and from my work at the health center, and it’s been interesting to see how fast the path deteriorates.  Same goes for the roads.  It’s funny, I got caught in heavy rain as I was walking home the other day and so I stopped underneath a shelter in the market until it lightened up a bit.  One vendor about my age was trying very hard to sell me fake nails, and he just didn’t understand why I didn’t want them! 

So this past week I’ve spent all of my time working in the ER.  The past few days have been very stressful and pretty frustrating actually.  There are two rotations here, and the first rotation has an amazing nurse who I love.  She is supportive and is very good at letting me do everything that I’m competent to do, and then teaching or showing me how to do new things.  She is very good and has helped me learn a huge amount.  However this week it’s been the other rotation, and I’ve had a rather hard go of it.  There’s a physician’s aid scheduled to be working in the ER, but because I’m there he stays in his office all day and reads, or even leaves the health center.  This leaves me running the ER by myself and with no reliable support person.  Honestly, the hardest part is keeping my emotions in check when this guy comes back, because he often is quite annoyed that I’m not able to run the place very smoothly.  Because I haven’t been trained to diagnose and prescribe medications, and I’m not comfortable doing so outside of my scope of practice with medications and conditions that I don’t understand well!  So it’s been a bit of a rough week.  Although that being said, there have been a lot of very interesting cases and wounds coming in this week, so it’s also been very good in that manner.  I have about one week left at this health center and then I’ll be moving back to Ganta to find other work. 

I was just thinking, it’s a shame I wrote about food when I did.  The day after I posted about Liberian food, I had a true culinary experience to write home about.  The ambulance hit and killed a ground squirrel, so they brought it home and the guards cooked it up and we ate it for supper!  Honestly, it tasted really good too, the meat was very sweet.  I was at the market yesterday, and we saw monkey and dog meat [they call it white bucket].  I’d love to get a chance to try both, we’ll see if that pops up.

My motor biking has plateaued for the moment, and I haven’t had a lesson since Sunday.  I actually had a bit of an accident on Sunday, the bike fell over on top of me and I scraped up my arm and hand a bit and got some killer bruises.  It’s kind of embarrassing because everybody asks how I got hurt when they see the scrapes on my arm, they always laugh when I say “well, I was learning how to drive motorbike when…”!  It’s good for me though, it’s put a solid healthy dose of fear into me for the next time I drive.  That motorbike is heavy!

Yep, so I’ve been keeping [fairly] safe and healthy and I’m still very much enjoying Liberia.  The picture was taken in the market I walk through every day to get to and from work.  The market day is every Tuesday, so it wasn't open when I took this!