When we headed up to the lab today Agnes took us over to the immunology lab that we were supposed to visit yesterday. When we first arrived no one was there yet so we waited in the neighboring drug resistance lab (which was one we had gone to yesterday morning). One of the drug resistnace guys came over to talk to us and when he shock my hand I thought he said "Claire," so I corrected him and said "no, Leah." Later Liz told me that when I thought he said Claire he really said clear, which is apparently what they say when someone is very pale.
When Agnes saw one of the immunology lab members pass by we followed him to the lab. He was a recently graduate medical student who is now working in the immunology lab. Unfortunately the lab does have any on going experiments at the moment. We wound up talking with him (unfortunately forgot his name . . . yep I'm a bad person) for a while about just school and life in general in Mali (he hadn't been told we were coming and didn't know what to do with us). After a while Agnes came and told us that the head of the immunology lab wouldn't be coming in to talk to us, so we returned to the clinical lab that has been our homebase for the past week. We continued to practing reading slides and identifying the species and stage of the parasites. I had a difficult time and was frustrated that i was supposed to be able to identify the species from a thick smear (some of which were rather old and deteriorated) when in all the clinical instrustions and manuals I've read say a thin smear is used. I was disappointed that I was getting many of them wrong, but Liz seemed to be doing well (I didn't find out till after lunch that she was looking at thin smears). After a while (when our eyes had lost focus) we headed down for lunch.
After lunch Liz and I went for a short walk around the garden that surrounds the guest house. There are so many different kinds of colorful flowers, however they apparently require a good deal of maintenance and they are watered most days. After our walk, we headed back up to the lab and switched slides to read. I did much better with the thin smears. And even was able to identify species with decent accuracy on some more thick smears. All the staring through the microscope with slightly crossed eyes began to make my head hurt though and at 5:30 we left and headed back to the guest house.
Later, while we were eating dinner Agnes stopped by and asked if we'd like to go out with her and her some African music (which I'd been hoping to do since we got here). She left to change and a little while later she came back and we headed out. We walked out to the main street to find a taxi, but unfortuantely their apparently hard to come by in Point G (that's the name of the area we're staying, its on top of a large hill/small mountain) because its not really in the city. After some searching though Agnes was able to find us a ride with someone she knew. We headed into town and drove past the grocery store we had gone to before. We arrived at a place called Safari, which is a restaurant that features different bands at night. The restaurant had a safari animal theme and one of the watresses had a zebra print shirt on that matched the fabric on the chairs. The place seemed to be popular with foreigners (its makes me wonder where the Malians go). We ordered some drinks and Agnes got a pizza (she insisted Lizand I try a piece even though we had already eaten dinner). The music started off as jazz, but then evolved into a hodgepodge of American music (Cher, Whitney Houston, Grateful Dead, Abba) and all though the music was good and the girls singing were very talented I was a little disappointed that it wasn't local Malian music. We stayed for a few hours and were all pretty tired when we left. We caught a taxi back to the guest house.
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