Bamako Day 6 (01/07/09)

Today we saw the rains come.

This morning was pretty much like yesterday, we went to the lab and begain by practicing slide making (and again I was a bit confused by directions in French). At first I was worse then yesterday but then I did better and could sort of consistently produce a good slide (though the exact definition is ellusive to me). After the guy teaching us was satisfied with out slide making he picked out some slides for us to read (which I think were a little bit unfair with how difficult they were). We read slides until it was time for lunch (at 1pm).

As we were walking down to lunch we realized that we both had a bunch of missed call and Liz had a message from Moctar. Apparently this morning we had forgotten to put our names down as having lunch at the house (for the first few days we didn't do this but it didn't seem a problem). When we got down to the house we appologized to Iesha (the cook) for forgetting and said we could just eat leftovers (there's always too much food anyways) and we let her know we would be here for dinner (I also made sure to right our names down for dinner, just incase). We ate some leftover casserole (though I couldn't tell you the exact ingredients) and some salad. After a bonus cookie in our room (that we had bought the other day at the grocery store) we headed back up to the lab.

On our walk back up we could see the clouds rolling in and as we cross through the open walkway between two buildings we began to feel some sprinkles. We talked with one of the lab techs (which by the way, here the "lab techs" have masters or Ph.D.s in biology (at home they don't even need a BS)) who talked to us a bit about our families (apparently in Mali to have a big family means your rich, so everyone has big families). He told us that here even if you are in school there is still a push for you to get married and start a family and we explained to him that in the US generally if your in grad school there's less of a push to have kids right away and usually you can get to your 30s without anyone making too much of a big deal about it.

We went back to reading slides and had our previous diagnonsis (of species and stage) corrected, though they didn't tell us if out counts were ok. I seem to have a problem distinguishing Plasmodium malariae schizonts from Plasmodium falciparum gametocytes (don't worry it was all greek to me a few weeks ago). One of the techs then went through the characteristics with us one by one as best he could in franglais, frequently asking "to comprende?" (do you understand?). I sort of did (I think)? After that Liz and I spent some more time trying to identify different stages that were giving us trouble. And then my phone rang again:
me: hello?
them: bonjour
me: bonjour
them: blah blah baljh ;nreuo[yhryjlkjhewrio[ (in french at lightening speed)
me: oui?
--> quick handover to Liz
Liz: bonjour
. . . we found out that this was our phones being registered (though we think it may just have been a survey). They wanted out names and where we lived. Liz explained that we were students from the US who were only here temporarily and that we wouldn't be helpful to their survey (if it was a survey they were pretty persistent because I was called from that phone number 4 other times before I picked it up this time). After hanging up Liz's phone (the number is one digit off from mine) rang. Again the same interaction.

After all that excitement we went to ask what to do with the slides we had made that morning and they said we should stain some and picked a few out for us. After setting up the staining we put away the slides we were view and covered up the microscopes (all their machines and things here have covers over them, there probably are covers in the labs at home, but I think they get lost pretty quickly). Once everything was done and cleaned up we headed back to the house.

I wasted some time surfing the internet and reading emails. And Liz finally convinced me to change the time on my watch (though I didn't really want to). We ate some dinner (it seemed to be a version of shepards pie and again some delishious mangos.