Critters, work and French

Photos; A guy in the village making new roofing for his house and Sara learning to operate Hope Clinic's new tractor!

Critters! We've had quite a few of them this week. In fact, we can't even sleep without listening all night long to a loud, and I mean loud chorus from our bullfrog choir. There must be thousands of them down in the swamp, and they are so loud, they make conversation hard from one side of the house to the other, not to mention trying to sleep. This morning, my native helper opened a box of screws that we were using, and a very brightly colored bird flew out. He couldn't find his way to the door and eventually wore out trying to get through a screen. I was able to catch him and bring him to our house where we have a African wildlife identification book, and it was an African Pygmy Kingfisher. I have never seen such brilliant colors on a bird, a brilliant almost phlorescent beek, with bright blue and red markings all over. Later in the day Sandy was walking back from the clinic through the grass and almost stepped on a snake. She said it was bright green with a blueish head, and we were told it was either an Emerald or a Boomslang. The Boomslang is one of the most poisonous in all of Africa, and my helper said you only have about 5-10 minutes if you don't get help right away. Sandy was really tickled to hear that. But the best one today happened to Sandy also. She still isn't laughing about it and I haven't quit. She went to take a shower, turned on the water valve which sticks through an oversized hole in the masonary wall, and out jumped a lizard! The lizard wasn't able to get out of the shower area, so it's just him and Sandy in the shower. He very quickly had the shower all to himself, she changed her mind. Oh, and one last critter observation....did you know termites can build a tunnel across your floor at the rate of 6 inches an hour? I watched them a few hours before pouring boiling water on them. That doesn't work so we're going to have to find something more potent.

This week has been spent trying to get this new house at least partially done before the medical team gets here next Tuesday. I've pretty much been working sunup to sundown on this house, and it looks like we're barely going to make it. There is a team of 10 surgeons coming from the Mercy Ship to work here at Hope Clinic for about 4 weeks. They specialize in Cleft palates and tumor removals, along with a lot of other specialized facio-cranial surgeries. It should be a very enjoyable month. They have been getting word throughout the country over the last year, letting people know that this would be available. It should be quite interesting to see who comes and what kinds of conditions we might see here. I'm sure I'll be talking about this quite a bit more over the next several weeks.

Bintou has agreed to Tutor Sara on her French language studies. Sara has been working on it both in school and with Rosetta Stone before we came over, but this should be a great help to have someone here help teach her that speaks the language. Bintou is a 25 year old single girl whose father Jairus is an anesthesiologist here at the clinic. I'm hoping Sara can pick it up, it sure would be a help to have an in-house interpeter.

We still don't know much about the elections. We heard last night that they expect to have all the ballots returned to the capitol tomorrow, and they said the elections results would be announced perhaps Saturday. It continues to be a tense situation, with reports of up to 10,000 people getting displaced in the last 10 days because of threats and intimidation. We're still praying for a miracle that things don't break open when the results are made known.