Horses, snakes, healthy kids

This morning I woke up and looked out the window and there were two beautiful large horses feeding in the yard. Then brushing my teeth, thinking how nice staying in this house is, I spot something brown near the towel cabinet. I shine my phone light on it—it looks like a coiled piece of leather, but I haven’t seen it before. Step closer, is that an eye? Mollie, I need a second opinion. I think it’s a snake, is it alive? Is that where there are no crickets around? How did it get in here? Are there more?

Maybe it is a house snake that kills the crickets and hides in corners. We contemplate poking it with a broom then decide that I’m too afraid that it will slither into my room. Let’s not make it mad.  It’s breakfast time, so we head up to the guest house for breakfast. I hope it doesn’t move while we’re gone. I decided to show our cooks (Margaret and Confidence) a picture of the snake and ask if it is poisonous.

Margaret shrieks when she sees the picture and says “that is in the house?? It is very poisonous! It will crawl into your bed and bite you at night! You need to call someone!” Uh oh, now I really hope it didn’t move.  She continues, “don’t eat breakfast, I will call some people, go back to your house now and I will send men to kill it”.

So we head back to the house, crossing our fingers that the snake hasn’t moved, and three men with uniforms and large sticks show up at the house ten minutes later. “Very poisonous” they tell us, “swallow fowl eggs whole”, be careful and “carry a torch at night so that you don’t step on one”. So they beat the poor snake with sticks, holding it down by the head as the rest of the body thrashed around. I kinda felt bad for the snake for half a second before I remember the thought of one crawling into my bed. I think I will go back to using my sleep sack.

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Last night we had dinner at our friend Emmanuel’s house. He picked us up in the evening and drove us to his house which is close by the hospital complex. He has three boys, ages 5 (Whitley), 7 (Keston), and 9 (Bradley) and a wife that is studying public health in Youande. There are neighbors/family members that help take care of the boys when he is away for work. One of the young girls helping around the house prepared us a goat from the yard in a stew that was served over rice. I clandestinely scooped only the sauce and veggies and Mollie got stuck with trying to politely chew the skin. The sauce with rice was very very tasty. We drank grenadine soda which was super sugary and had full blown diabetes by the third glass.

We sat in the main room and looked through photo albums and he talked to us about life in Cameroon. You could see the kids’ room across the hall with mosquito nets there because “it is hard to stay in the hospital when the kids get malaria”. The three boys played drums and hide and seek. The one would count to ten and then say “ready?” and then the other two would respond “ready!” which would completely reveal their hiding spots every time. They didn’t seem to mind. They also played a game with bottle caps where they would stack the caps and place a peanut in them and try to knock them over with another bottle cap. If you knocked the tower over you won and would get the peanut. They giggled the whole time, grenadine running through their veins and American caramels between their teeth.

Alas, healthy children.

We gave Emmanuel a solar-powered flashlight/phone charger that one of the NICU nurses had given us for our trip. He travels a lot at night so it was a perfect gift to thank him for welcoming us into his home. He loved it! And of course the kids loved the sticky caramel. He was such a great host and kept apologizing to us saying, “my wife would be much better at hosting if she was here”. He told us a lot about the way things work in Cameroon and the advances that have been made in recent years. He spoke about the traditional healers and weddings and education and children and traditions. He showed us pictures of his friends, many of which have moved to the US. When I asked him what they do in the US, he responded, “we don’t ask that question, we don’t want to know what they are doing there”. I wondered what he meant by that, but it didn’t sound good.

This Sunday is Cameroon’s National Woman’s Day. I’ll have experienced Youth Day and Woman’s Day while I’m here, so I asked if there was a Man’s Day. Emmanuel laughed and said “every day is a Man’s Day”. He beat me to the punch line.

Mollie leaves tomorrow which I’m bummed about. I will have to get better at entertaining myself, maybe set up some peanuts and bottle caps. I will be busy again on Monday when I am back on the wards and stressing about the little kids with big bellies. And then in a couple weeks I will be in Paris with the long lost boy. I can’t believe it’s already been a month since I got here, so much experience in such a short amount of time. So much to digest.