Bandiagara Day 5 (20/07/09)

This morning I asked Badry about the rain. I had seen people cultivating the land, but Badry said they weren’t planting yet. They’re waiting for the rains to come. This year the rains are late (global warming?) and people are starting to worry; if they don’t come by the end of July there will be a lot of problems. Last year the rains were early and after the season started it rained about every three days.
Today we started in the clinic; there were the usually cases of fevers (which we have to check for malaria), colds, intestinal parasites (though they usually don’t bother testing, they just treat it). Things progressed as normal, but there weren’t many patients, so by midmorning I went to hang out with Tolo in the lab. There we did some thick smears to check for malaria and when a case was confirmed blood had to be drawn. I tried to help, but when I went to remove the tunicate the needle slipped out and I felt pretty bad because that meant the kid had to be stuck again. We wound up heading back to the house a bit early for lunch because there wasn’t much to do.
After lunch when we went back to the clinic we hung out in the office for a bit and then Tolo offered to take us on a walk over to the administrative quarter (where the post office is and where the government officials live) across the river. Shortly after we headed out the wind began to pick up (which meant the dust began to kick up a bit) and it looked like rain clouds we coming. Tolo asked if we would be ok or if we wanted to head back; there wasn’t much to do back at the clinic so we informed him that we wouldn’t melt and that it was ok to keep going. But after awhile the dust made it difficult to see and my eyes were becoming irritated, so we all decided it was a good idea to head back. Shortly after we got back we headed back to the house and Liz and I took desperately desired showers (or as close to a shower as you can get with a bucket and plastic teapot) to try to wash off as much dust as possible. After dinner we headed over to the team’s house to play Uno. On the walk over the stars were totally amazing (there’s hardly any light pollution here, as you would expect). I think I was able to find Orion, though the angle and location were a bit different. The guys weren’t familiar with Orion, but apparently they have a constellation of a Great Hen (but it’s a winter constellation). After playing cards for an hour or so we were pretty tired and walked back with Tolo and Dembele. On the way we wound up stepping on a few frogs by accident, but they seemed unhurt (or at least were well enough to run away when I chased them). After we got back it was straight to bed (it was a bit late and we were pretty tired).