Docteur Carolyn, Medicine Woman

I have been playing doctor around the neighborhood, which is pretty fun but also really disturbing. Even well off families like that of my host, Kantos, seem to lack basic knowledge about first aid. It amazes me that anyone makes it past age 5 around here, because no one cleans open wounds, let alone covering them! Last week, Cynthia, Kantos's 8 year old daughter, got a massive cut on her ankle (evil cat!) and was limping around the compound and missed school as a result of the cut, and still no one cleaned it! When I got home from the orphanage for lunch and saw that she was missing school because of a cut (can you imagine what your parents would say if you wanted to miss a day of third grade because of a boo boo? yeah right), i got my med kit out and went to work on her. When I finished gauzing her up, her older brother showed me a gash on his foot, so I cleaned and band-aided that. Then I jokingly pronounced, 'Who else has a malady to show the doctor?' and the kids all pushed forward this little girl named Alvalo, who had fallen two weeks before and still had 2 huge open wounds on her legs, clearly infected!! Finally, after that, my work was done, though I have been constantly rebandaging since then and explaining what I'm doing to the mothers (as everyone comes to watch and laugh at me whenever I do anything, especially laundry, which is for some reason particularly amusing) so they can use it in the future (lord only knows if any of them will).

It's all a matter of this massive cultural gap on the issue of hygiene and cleanliness, one that I find very hard to think through without a western superiority complex. Animals are everywhere, especially goats and chickens; and their shit is everywhere; and little barefoot kids are everywhere too. You do the math. It totally freaks me out. People sweep their homes and yards daily, but I don't understand why no one puts the goats in a fence or the chickens in a coop. I suppose I should just ask someone. Similarly, you eat with your hands (though when I'm at the orphelinat, I'm always given a fork), so people just pour some water over their right hand and then dig in. I just turn a blind eye most of the time, even to my own hygiene, and try to roll with all the punches. Still, it hasn't escaped my notice that people seem to be sick a lot! All of Kantos's kids have been sick with a bad cough and fever since I've been here, and they continue to carry the baby twins around even as they wheeze! And poor baby Radovan, one of the twins-- he had an awful cough and fever, and his mom kept on carrying him on her back into the kitchen, a little wooden hut with an open cookfire inside; so there he was, cough cough coughing (at only 8 months old), and breathing in a shit ton of smoke!! Alas, I'm not afraid to tell the kids what's up when it comes to health stuff, but I still feel inappropriate, condescending, telling someone 15 years my senior, who has already raised 3 kids, what to do with her infants.

With all of this, I try to remind myself that there are millions of things that we do that are entirely non-sensical, or at least ridiculous. The time I told the kids at the orphelinat about dish washers and they laughed hysterically comes to mind. 'Not only have we invented a machine to do our laundry for us but a machine to wash our plates too!!? What do Americans actually DO? No wonder Americans are all fat!'