Before we started our trip around the world, the number one question everyone had for us was “where will you live when you get home?” (check out #4 in the FAQ). It was sort of maddening how often we were asked this. We were so excited about planning our trip and seeing the world, planning […]
Case #s 3-5: A Rough Day in Maternity The woman in the foreground with her hand over her face is a 22-year-old who had arrived to the hospital by motorcycle just a bit before this picture was taken. You can see her baby wrapped in a red fuzzy blanket in the left lower corner of […]
Case #2: An 8-Year-Old Boy Unconscious After Road Trauma This is the Minor Theatre. This is a place where patients are sent for minor procedures such as laceration repair (getting stitches for a cut), casting of broken bones, removal of casts, dressing changes for chronic wounds, incisions of abscesses, occasionally gynecologic stuff. Pretty light, patients […]
Case #1: An 8-Year-Old Boy with Extensive Burns Abraham (name changed for privacy) had already been an inpatient at Tengeru for a few weeks before I arrived. He had sustained full thickness (3rd-degree) burns over his upper back and most of his right arm in a kitchen accident. His treatment required regular debridement of the […]
Karibu means “you’re welcome” in Swahili, the language shared by many countries of East Africa. As tourists in Tanzania, we were continuously greeted with this word, even before we said “thank you”. However, unlike the suggestive and perhaps slightly snarky “you’re welcome” one might say, for example, to a child who has forgotten to say […]
It is with mixed emotions and no small amount of sadness and disappointment that I announce that the Occasionally Magnificent Seven have had to return to the United States. In obedience to the US State Department directive, we left Vienna on Saturday and drove to Frankfurt, from where we were lucky enough to get a […]
The following post was written by Libbey as part of her Kindergarten writing curriculum (spelling was corrected by her teacher): Yesterday I visited the Maasai. The Maasais killed a goat. It was cool. The Maasais sleep on cow skin. It was really dark in their room. They shell beans by whacking a stick on the […]
There have been a surprising number of camels in our lives lately, given the background rate of camel exposure over the 15 years or so preceding this trip. As a means of transportation, I’m not sure the camel makes up in romanticism what it loses in practicality. As a food source, my limited exposure suggests […]
I left you with a cliffhanger at the end of my Hallowe’en/All Saints/Castañada post, in which I wondered how I was going to acquire a turkey for Thanksgiving here in Marrakech. Several of you took that musing quite seriously and reached deep into your contact lists for friends who were familiar with the area and […]
Since our departure from California in early June, we have not yet experienced any major American holidays abroad until now. We celebrated the 4th of July in NYC (where better?) and several family birthdays en route (Rowena the night before we left, Libbey in NYC, Rainier in the Bernese Oberland, and Shefler in Lucerne), but […]
