30 November, 2004 - 07:47

It's November 30th.

I couldn't sleep quite well enough last night because my roommate has this annoying habit of making a clicking noise each time she exhales through her mouth. So, I woke up at 3am and didn't really fall back asleep because of the loud click every five seconds or so.

I'm back in the office now after a week of staying in Zambia and another day of being out in the field, visiting health centres.

The safari was amazing and we managed to convince our guides to take us on a walking safari which meant that we saw less animals but also meant that we could really let the land sink in. For example, the sausage trees were everywhere. And although I see them all the time in Lilongwe, here on the safari they were literally every-second tree.

We traveled with an American diplomatic family living in Lilongwe, a paralegal from D.C., and a Dutch guy named Job who had been volunteering/teaching in Uganda just because he wanted to. The American family was annoying - they paid no attention to their two A.D.D. kids and once, Bennett the mother said to her daughter: "If I don't spend enough time away from you, I'll never miss you."

I wouldn't say that to my dog.

Plus, they talked to us about how they had three fridges two of which they didn't use and when we said we hadn't even ONE fridge and asked if we could buy/rent one from them they balked and said, oh, no, it's the embassy's property.

I give them two years before Bennett files for divorce.

And yesterday was a great introduction to my work with health centres. We went out to Dedza to visit Chikuse health centre in order to correct some of the data that needs correcting. On the way back, we traveled on the same mountainous road but this time it was washed over with rain from the flash floods that we're getting now because of the rainy season. On top of that, we were carrying a woman who was having severe headaches because of her AIDS-related meningitis, and two mothers with a puking kid in the back seat. But the kid was so funny. He wanted me to take a snap of him and his dad. And when he saw a picture of himself on the screen of my camera, he was so taken aback at his own image that he laughed hysterically for five minutes.

That kid made the day.