After living here for more than 2
years, I, Erin, am still surprised at how long things sometimes take.
We come from such a time oriented culture,
“Time is money” for example, that I frequently get frustrated with the time it takes to get things done.
I often think, “I’ll just whip up
a batch of…,” then it turns out taking much longer than anticipated.
Here in Barat the only canned food I’ve seen
is sardines.
Even the equivalent of
brown sugar, which is actually palm sugar, has to be either melted or chopped-up to use.
There are no prepared lunch
meats (oh how I miss that), peeled baby carrots, or frozen vegies waiting to be
steamed.
My quick and easy, last minute,
go to meal of Spaghetti now requires tomatoes to be chopped (pealed and seeded
if you really want a nice consistency) to make the sauce from
scratch.
Thankfully last time we were in
the big city we stocked up on canned tomato paste...instant spaghetti sauce here
we come!
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| Palm sugar wrapped in banana leaves. |
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| Tomatoes waiting to become sauce. These are the biggest I've seen. |
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| Milk to be made from powder! |
The epitome of things taking time
has most recently been experienced in my attempt to learn more about the occurrence of
malaria here.
Two blocks away there is a
local clinic, similar to the public health department in the States.
It offers minor medical services and attends
to community health needs.
There is a
specific offices dedicated to malaria so I thought this would be the best place
to start.
The first day I asked to speak
to someone in regards to malaria.
The
office worker wasn’t in as her hours are 8am to 12pm and I had come in at 2 in the
afternoon.
I returned the second day
only to find she was out sick.
On the following
day, a Friday, she was still out sick.
On
Monday I finally was able to meet with her.
She said she was really busy but could prepare some documents for me if
I would bring a thumb drive in on Thursday.
Thankfully we were able to briefly discuss some of my questions.
Thursday I returned to find, that once again,
she was not in the office, though it was 9:30 in the morning.
Unfortunately no one knew when she would be
in and her cell happened to be inactive.
On the sixth day, Friday again, I returned again to no avail.
This time I left my number to be informed
when she returned.
I have yet to get the documents she mentioned, but was able to get a small picture of malaria occurrence here in Barat from our brief conversation.
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| The "Public Health Center" |
