Long exhale, short inhale...

(The General seeks shelter under a mango tree during a late afternoon rain.)

I wasn't feeling so well yesterday, or this morning for that matter.


I was all aches and fever and chills and more aches, and dreading this afternoon.

Part of my preparation for working on the women's health section of the preventative health manual has been meeting with small groups of local women to hear about their concepts of health and disease. A few weeks ago I made an appointment to spend this afternoon with the area's traditional birth attendants, an appointment that I had been looking forward to.

But I felt so gross.

I came home for lunch, demolished an entire carton of frozen juice (a Bush Slurpee, as I like to call it) and then found myself feeling quite well (medication may have also played a role). I jumped on The General and drove into town.

The traditional birth attendants were right on time and eager to talk, all shy smiles and sweet faces. They graciously answered my long list of questions about how they help women in Mucombeze bring their babies into the world.

I wish I would have had someone taking pictures. I think the women here are so beautiful. I love their colorful head coverings and the wild hodge podge of clothing that makes up their attire. The birth attendants looked wonderful sitting against a blue wall in their multicolored clothes with bright orange Fantas in their hands.

I was sitting on a simple brown chair, laptop on my knees, sporting one pair of the oversized earrings I bought on Etsy specifically for Mozambique.

The birth attendants kept expressing an eagerness for more training (well, training at all, they have never had any). And who should arrive midway during our conversation but Senor Da Cruz! This fellow is an adminstrator in the health district and I know him from past immunization campaigns. I had meant to get in touch with him to ask about training for the birth attendants, and...there he was! We chatted, he told me that their were trainings every three months in a city a few hours away and that the government paid for them. All we needed to do was write a letter or recommendation from the mission. This was exciting. I hope it's true.

The birth attendants were watching this little exchange, and after Da Cruz left we went back to our conversation. At the end of our time I asked the women if they would be interested in training and they responded with an enthusiatic yes. But...they could only go in April once they were done tending to their crops.

Fine, I said. In the mean time would you like to meet every few weeks and have classes here with me?
Tell us when to be here, they said, and we'll be here.

I'm so excited.

So, first order of business: get these women some gloves to wear during delivery! They don't have any protective equipment at all and could only tell me some very vague facts about HIV/AIDS. I think that will be one of the first lessons.

Second order of business: Have regular training sessons with the birth attendants.

Third order of business: Get these women off to school!

Or course, I need to run this by my superiors...and find out if these trainings actually exist.

Here's hoping.

After my afternoon with the birth attendants I went to the community leader's house and taught him how to use his new puffer. Oh, lands. It was so funny. It took a while but I think he got it.

In the meantime, a midafternoon rain storm blew in and The General sought shelter under a tree with the required crowd of small children crowding curiously around him. He is more popular than me, I think. Ah, well. You can't win them all.

A visitor...

Look who dropped1 by to help me with lunch the other day...

Me: Could you pass me the spatula, buddy?

Frog: Anything for you.

1 I know I should have said "hopped" instead of "dropped", but I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

It's a hard knock life...

My internet is being a bit slow at the moment, so these are not all the photos I wanted to post. I scalped these three pictures from Rick and Heather (a couple who work here with SAM, along with their adorable foster daughter, Tendai). I will try and get the rest of them up later, but for now...

My first weekend here all the staff went to the Indian Ocean (close to Inhambwe, if you are into maps) for a few days. The place we stayed at was right on the water and there was an awesome reef running parrallel to our beach. The weather was perfect. I love the ocean.

This picture is a little misleading. I wanted to go snorkling out on the reef but didn't have a life jacket. I am a pretty terrible swimmer to I took this board out and floated on it with my head submerged in the water.

Heather and I spent a lot of time frolicking around in the ocean and letting big waves smack into us. So fun. Seriously.

All that frolicking was pretty tiring, however, so every now and then we had to take breaks. You can't see it really in this shot, but the sun was just starting to go down and the light was beautiful on the water. Oh, it was so lovely at the beach!

Recap

I bought my motorbike yesterday. It is purple and I call it The General. I spent a good portion of my day today riding around the farm, practicing switching gears. For my reward, I have a watch tan.

This morning I also went out on a home nursing visit to see an elderly woman who is part of the mission's orphan/widow program. She has been feeling not so hot, and has one nasty sounding lung. I also drove out to the mission's school to try and find a little boy who we hear has a serious abscess on his chin. No luck tracking him down, but his mom was around so we sent her home with some medication and careful instructions to bring her son to the health post next week.


So, my trip over. I will use photos to capture the magic:



Here I am, just arriving at the airport in Calgary, striking a pose for mom. You can tell if my mom is taking the picture because she always makes me place my feet just so. I'm so hopeful, so stress free...

Now, the suitcase on the bottom of my pile was being a tad problematic. When I weighed it the night before it was slightly overweight. When I tried to open it to remove some items, the zipper jammed. I decided to just pay the overweight fees because I wasn't sure what to cut. When I got to the airport I was informed that I was actually allowed to take THREE CHECKED ITEMS.

Three? Who has ever heard of that? So, weight was no longer the issue but I did need to wiggle some stuff out of the suitcase so that bag at least would be the right weight. The stuff I removed was going to go in a cute plaid plastic shopping bag-esque container the airline provided.

Here I am with my cousin Laura and the plaid bag. Although I can't actually open my suitcase to get anything out of it, we are optimistic that we will be able to drag enough stuff out of the bag using the little gap that is available before the zipper jam. Trying to claw my belongings out of the gap resulted in numerous scrapes, which resulted in drops of blood all over my stuff. What's a girl to do?

So, a few minutes into our endeavours my suitcase had a change of heart and the zipper came completely undone, undone in the sense that I would never be able to close it again. The zipper, and the bag, were toast.

Noting my predicament, the airline guy gave me two giant see through plastic sacks to shovel all my stuff into. I liked to think of it as a glorified Ziplock. That's right, all my stuff in a giant baggie, all set to jet across several continents. I was rather nervous about my stuff actually arriving, but, it did!

Who are the gentelmen behind us, you ask? Why, it's the entire team of Saskatchewan Roughriders. As Laura and I were madly trying to repack my stuff in the baggie, with fistfulls of underpants flying through the air in the middle of the chaos, these gentlemen quietly lined up behind me. So quietly that I didn't really notice their arrival until my baggie was packed and I became conscious of the fact that people had been watching my little episode. Ah well.

Okay, the rest of the trip, moving on.

London: neutral, I slept practically the entire time.

Jo-berg: walked around a corner and stumbled upon a woman having a seizure. First Aid hadn't arrived so I went to help, and a few minutes later a doctor came along. Later, I took an airport survey and was given a free key chain. There is so connection between the seizure and the key chain, I'm just trying to wrap this up.

Beira, Mozambique: I handed in my passport to get my visa and was given back a passport which was 1) burgandy in color, and 2) had a picture of a man in it. The customs guy asked, "Is this yours?" Had I known more Portuguese I would have said, "Are you kidding?" I had to wait a while but I did get my nice, navy blue passport back.

So, there you have it.

Arrived...

Hello, friends.

Today is a good day. I am wearing my favorite blue butterfly earrings and my feet are dusty and red. Perfect.

I am waiting to go to down to the woodshop to pick up a plank for the..."shelving unit"... I am making in my tent. My tent is the cutest. You can check it out on MTV Cribs next week.

I want to tell you all about my trip over but I will save that for another time. It will be an epic tale. Ziplock bags, professional athletes, a mistaken identity oh, I could go on! And I will. Tonight? Tomorrow? Some time.

Enough to say that I am here and safe and sound and taking the occasional deep breath.

Hope...

I leave for Mozambique tomorrow evening, so today has been full of last minute packing, shopping, general running about.

Today, as I sorted through stacks of this and that, I came across an article that I wrote for CIDA at the end of my internship in February. I remember exactly how I felt when I was writing it, and it is those same feelings that motivate me now.

"For five months, beginning in August of 2008, I worked in a water and sanitation project in rural western Uganda as part of a CIDA/Samaritan's Purse internship. One of the daily highlights was the natural beauty of the African bush. Everything looked like an illustration out of a Dr. Seuss book with the hills rolling crazily along, bursting with tress, shrubs and flowers of impossible variety. As we shuddered down rusty, rutted roads in our truck I would stare out the window, caught up in the stunning explosion of color.

In that marvelous medley of brilliance one tree stood out like a ghost, its sparse grey branches gnarled and bare. It looked completely lifeless, except for one thing. At the end of each deadened limb a vibrantly red flower bloomed--a burst of life against a backdrop of grey.

I was often reminded of an ancient proverb from the Bible, "Hope deferred, " it says, "makes the heart sick." Frustrated hope was all around me. Both personally and on a greater scale in the Ugandan people who hoped for almost everything: better health for their families, education for their children, peace in their homes, rain for their crops, food for their stomachs, and help from me which I often felt unable to give.

There were days when everything seemed to be painted in shades of grey. Our water program was truly making a difference, but it was easy to be overwhelmed by the many needs that were still unmet. In the midst of it all, however, I began to recognize splashes of the brightest, deepest, most perfect red. I loved those strange Ugandan trees because they made my heart ache with truth: hope always remains.

I heard hope in the trickling cadence of a filter that turned water from life threatening to life sustaining. I saw it when people living in absolute poverty coaxed beautiful flowers to grow around their simple mud and brick homes. I felt it in the generous hearts of my Ugandan community who found fulfillment and joy in relationships instead of possessions and who looked to the future with an expectation of good things to come.

I am leaving this internship with an overwhelming sense of optimism. We face massive and devastating problems as a global community, but I believe that we can work towards a better reality. There is enough good amongst us that we could make the world a better place if we earnestly chose to do so.

The rest of that ancient proverb declares that "a longing fulfilled is a tree of life." This experience has strengthened my vision to bring life into grey landscapes, watching hope bloom into reality, one brilliant red flower at a time."

Long time, no see...

So, what have I been up to for the last few months?

Well, lots of very ordinary, quite lovely, deliciously everyday things.

Mostly I have been working as a maternity nurse. I can't really take pictures at work, so here is a self portrait taken once I arrived home...after a stretch of night shifts. I actually love my job, and I can't say this photo really captures that emotion too well.

I was house sitting for a few months, too. It was wonderful. This was my tiny living room packed full of all my little treasures.

While I was house sitting I got to hang out with my super cute neighbor. Here he is helping me with the gardening.


It has been the best of times, truly.

There was one little dark cloud in my summer, if I am going to be truthful. You see, I was all ready to head off to grad school in September on the west coast.

I was rather excited. I even bought a new pair of galoshes for the rainy weather.

Then, my grad school of choice changed their mind about little me and I was left without any Plan B, at least as far as I could see. It was rough.

So, what am I up to now?

Well, instead of polishing my galoshes, I have been digging these out of storage:

These items may appear a little...vibrant, shall we say, for usage here is southern Alberta. I agree, which is why I only wear them when I am in Africa, which is where I am going in a few weeks.

I am going back to Mozambique as a short-term missionary with SAM Ministries. This is the same place I was when I was a student nurse.

I will be helping with preventative health care initiatives, along with other things.

I leave on Octber 17th, Lord willing.

I am rather excited.

I think it's going to be the best of times.