Playing herdswoman

With Bebe still not back from Gao and most staff in a training for regional Chef de Poste Medical, I had to handle baby weighings on my own. 38 weighed and many requiring milk or porridge explanations. Or weaning advice. Sometimes I feel like my head will explode doing it all! Yelling for this one to take the baby's clothes off, that one to take her hands off the baby in the hanging scale, another one to give me the baby's name as I write her registration and the number of kilos for another baby's chart, and then demand another one to listen to my advice etc. etc. Whew.

The president of the Health and Hygiene Committee wants to do another project. We still haven't gotten funding for the garbage collection one! He showed me this description of a project emphasizing how they wanted American donors because Americans like hands to be washed. Right. I explained we shouldn't be picky in terms of nationalities, everyone should value clean hands!! Plus we discussed how making it a soap-making and hand-washing project would make it sustainable. Now if only the garbage collection project can be funded and I can close-out on the Girls' Club project so I can apply for more Partnership funds...then this would also be doable.

Great radio show on water treatment where I went script-less and we covered everything I wanted to talk about. I have to get better about witty "last words" so we can conclude with something other than greetings. I am getting better with being able to just answer questions M. Haidara poses and feeling like we are simply conversing about good health. Which I hope makes it more accessible to listeners.

I helped my teammate go get his goats (his old house caved in due to rains) but we left to late in the evening and so soon I found myself leading a nanny goat across town in the dark. I was attempting to use the clicks I hear Abba using all the time. And she would respond to me; though, clearly she wanted to bolt every time a car or truck or moto passed us. Probably knew she lost too many cousins to that sort of untimely death before. My teammate had her kid in his arms, and if he strayed too far nanny goat would go nuts. Screaming. Mwehhhh! Mweeeeeeeehhh! Despite utter blackness (a moonless night) people still knew we were white and comments of "Eh, Anasarey du hancin izey! The whites have goats now!" followed us across town.