My Routine

9-23
Things are going very well for the most part- I’ve settled into somewhat of a routine and I feel like I’m doing what little I can to get my work rolling. I wake up pretty early every morning and have a few hours to myself to run, workout, or clean up before I go to the health center. My host mother brings me my corn porriage which I always mix with peanut butter. I boil some water and make some powdered milk with coffee or hot chocolate or protein powder. I draw my water from the well, take my bucket bath, and then walk over to the health center about 8:30 or 9. I work for a few hours, doing silly little tasks that they could certainly do without me- taking blood pressures, weighing women and helping with prenatal counsels. My favorite day is baby vaccination day because dozens of the most adorable babies come in on their mother’s backs. The baby weighing process isn’t quite down pat yet, so I’ve been helping with that. I have however, given up on actually holding the baby because most of them so scared to be held b a white girl that they end up peeing on me. I've also started to give a few presentations in conjunction with these days. To start off, I taught the women how to make oral rehydration solution. Go figure the first time I mixed up the salt and sugar and put way too much salt in and my coworker, Aja was laughing at me for the rest of the morning. Aja is 20 and is one of my best friends here. She helps me out a lot, and I’m helping her learn English (which would be her fourth language). She is doing somewhat of an interhip here, but is planning on going to medical school in the future.
Right before lunch I tutor my homolouge’s awkward 16-year old son in English. It’s not the first thing I want to be doing, but it’s how I can pay back my homolouge’s family for feeding me lunch everyday. After lunch, I study Bambara on my own for a while (I still haven't found a tutor) and then I "yalayala" (walk around) the village, talking to people, asking them questions about life in Dombila.
By about 4:00 boy's club starts. I teach beginning Enlish to 6 little boys (from 7-12 years old) and then afterwords, we do a workout. So I suppose I just accidentatly started my running club because one-by-one they just started following me. Now, we do little runs through the fields, stop to do pushups, lunges, and sometimes a dip in the little river that runs through it. They have a blast.
Afterwords, I take my second bucket bath, prepare and eat my dinner. Usually I just cook up anything I can find- rice, beans, potatoes, eggs.... I discovered a maringa tree in the middle of the village, whose leaves are packed with iron, protien, and fiber, so I"ve started to add them to my meal. Caroline, my teammate, came to visit one night and we cooked the extreames of both the prossesed and natural food worlds- boxed mac and cheese mixed with cooked maringa leaves. Afterwords, I relax in my family's compound, chatting, drinking tea, playing guitar and eating grilled corn until about 9:30 when I crash in bed. Donni, donni, and day by day, but you know, life is pretty good.