The Joys of African Living

I am settling into life here in Nalerigu.  One of the things I needed to get used to is that normal chores take a bit longer and are more tedious here in Africa. 

I am very blessed to have a washing machine, but driers take too much energy and so I hang my clothes out to dry, which I have never had to do before.  I never thought that there was a right or wrong way to hang clothes up, but the first time I hung laundry out, two of my little friends, Thomas and Hamza, told me I was doing it all wrong and they took it all down and re-hung it.  I did not think it looked much different, but they were please that they had taught me how to hang my clothes out.

At home, I was always forgetting to put my trash out on trash day or I would remembered late the night before and convinced myself I was too tired to walk the 100 yards to the garage to put it out for pick-up.  I took it for granted that the trash man would just be coming the next week to whisk my trash away.  In Nalerigu, taking out the trash has whole new meaning.  I not only have to take out my own trash, but I have to dispose of it also by burning it in my trash hole in my back yard.  Hint; the best way to burn trash is by putting it into a cardboard box, the box goes up in flames pretty quick and just incinerates everything inside of it, otherwise you sort of have to move stuff around and try to get all of the pieces of trash to catch fire and it takes forever.  I am constantly on the lookout for used boxes to burn.

Burning trash with Thomas

Food preparation is another thing that just takes a bit longer here.  Here I only drink water from a special water filter, but it does not really run like a normal faucet, so whenever I am home, I turn on the water filter and let it collect in a huge pan, which I then pour into a water cooler.  A few nights ago, I got up in the middle of the night thirsty and just wondered into the kitchen and got a glass and filled it with tap water.  It wasn’t until I pretty much downed the entire glass that I woke up enough to realize what I had just done.  That is defiantly a mistake I will be paying for in a day or two.  Here, you cannot just simply clean vegetables and fruits with soap and water.  It does not kill the bacteria, so I soak everything I will be eating raw in bleach water.  If it is going to be cooked it does not have to be soaked.  Different things need to soak for different amounts of time, but mostly it is about 20 minutes in bleach water and then I rinse them off with the filtered water.  Eggs also have to be soaked in bleach, but before I soak them I get the added pleasure of cleaning off the chicken poop on the eggs.  We basically buy everything straight from the farmers in market. 

 

One of thing I am very grateful for is having someone to clean for me. The windows are different here.  They are made in a way so air can always flow into the houses, but with that air come the dust and the dirt.  You have to clean the floors almost every day.  I could never keep up with that myself so I hired a girl from town, Rachel, who cleans three times a week.  She is a great help.

Case of the Week - Osteosacroma of the femur

This week I amputated the leg of a 16 year old boy named Timothy.  He had a tumor growing at his distal femur for the past several years.  The tumor was quite an impressive size.  Unfortunately here amputation is the only option for cases of malignancy of the bones.  They also usually present very late in their course, sometimes already metastatic.  There is no chemotherapy that can be offered after surgery either.  I am told that most of these kids will eventually succumb to their disease.

The tumor was growing on the bone right above his knee.  His foot is off the picture on the left and the markings on the right on the leg is where I performed the amputation.