One Year Ago....

Just a few shots to share with y'all moments in these past couple of months = )

During the formation with the youth this summer, a couple of the sessions I held involved dance lessons. Here we are teaching a pretty simple salsa routine. People here have a very natural rythym though, so salsa comes very quickly to them.

Vaccination days continue to be some of my favorite days here. Here I am vaccinating some babies in Waah, a village in the deep bush about 40 km outside of Dir. Its my favorite village as its mostly Fulbe women and you have to speak the local dialect to do work. You have to take a motorcycle to get there on a dirt road, (twice the motorcycle has broken down and my fellow nurse and I have had to walk upwards of an hour until we can find repair! But something I love about Cameroonians is how patient they are with those type of problems and both times the nurse and I have only laughed at the situation).

I found a very cheap way to make banana bread and spent most of the month of July teaching women in village how to make it! Here I am in Norbert's kitchen making cake for his kid's birthdays. Birthdays are not really celebrated here in Cameroon, but since two of Norbert's kids have birthdays within a day of each other we decided to throw them a small party. It was pretty simple, with banana bread, popcorn, juice, and about 20 little kids. However, the two little girls were THRILLED to be celebrating their birthday and we spent that Sunday dancing to somebody's radio = )

Sadly enough, Pistache died about two weeks ago. She got pregnant in late June and had a complicated birth (the babies ended up dying inside her belly, and a couple of days later she went septic and died herself). It really shook me, as not only was Pistache my pet, but truly my best companion in Dir (here is a picture of us on one of our many walks around village). As much as her death hit me (the villagers couldn't believe that I would be such a mess over an animal) it has also with time been put into perspective for me. I've had a lot of thoughts in the past two weeks about the difference here, and in the United States about people's relationships with their animals. Even though I loved her dearly, and I'm forever grateful for the companion that she was to me (especially in my first couple of months at post) I realize that she is an animal, and when I'm feeling sad about it, I need to remember that people lose PEOPLE here on such a daily basis.

This is a more encompassing view of the soyfield, when it was still in the process of ripening. Now that the soy is ready for harvest the field looks mostly yellow. We started harvesting last week and it has been A LOT of work. Mostly takes a lot of patience, and constant availability as you pray for sun, and make sure you're ready to bring in your harvest at any moment (because the rains can come so sporadically). And truly it is very labor intensive as you try to get the beans out of their pods. (I will never once again take for granted how easy it is to go to the grocery store in the United States) But we have done about 25% of it thus far and have about 25 kilos of soy already! So if all goes well we should be able to have a TON of soy in about a months time!

On another random note, tommorow commemorates the one year anniversary of this whole crazy adventure starting. It blows my mind that it has already been a year. A part of me feels like I only arrived in this country 10 days ago, and yet the context of this past year has seemed like 10 years of life squeezed into one. I am super grateful for everything that this past year has taught me. About what it means to believe in your capability as a human being, in how human beings are so capable of adapting to different situations. I'm grateful for how much I'm continuing to learn about different ways of living life, about how beautiful life can be when you simplify it, about how I'm constantly challenged at the hospital and in how to deal with how present death is here every day. I feel as if I learn more and more every day what it means to love your neighbor, and a little bit more every day I'm learning what it means to be a friend to yourself. It has been a year that I would relive again in a heartbeat, and I truly look forward to the lessons, adventures, and moments that I know will continue to come.