Elections

I just received the email that our team mission is a "go".  We were informed last month that we might be canceled depending on the election results and resulting response in Haiti.  The election results were supposed to be announced tomorrow.  They have now been postponed until Monday after we arrive.

They also told us that the security threat was level 4.

That's very helpful, but they failed to tell us how many levels there are.  Is level 4 somewhere around "don't walk around wearing big diamonds as you might get robbed" or more like "the plagues of locusts and frogs have nothing on the stuff you are about to see"?

Slight difference.

Either way, I am DEET and permethrin prepared.  It won't do much for the locusts or frogs, but at least the mosquitoes might leave me alone.  I would like to avoid malaria if at all possible.  I have accepted I will probably catch something.  I just would like it to be a manageable infectious disease.

* Image is courtesy of WHO Malaria Department.  It can also be found here.  I do not own this image nor claim to have any rights to this image.*

Fleeing the country

I'm fleeing the country on Saturday.  Okay, so not technically fleeing, but leaving for a wee bit.

I've been blessed to be allowed to go to Haiti with a group providing sustainable medical care for those in the Port-au-Prince area.  I was able to use some of my vacation time to go and was given the full support of my department attendings.  I can not tell you all how wonderful it feels to finally be able to give more back after all the years I've been in school.  This is something that I'm passionate about and feel so very blessed to have the opportunity to do.

I am super excited.

I am super nervous.

I had to see the international travel clinic doctor to prepare for the trip.  I am quite aware that doctors in general make awful patients.  I am no exception.  I knew that I would have to get shots for this trip.  You guys, I hate needles.  Rumor has it that I once passed out getting my tuberculosis skin test.  This has never been confirmed as the only eye-witnesses mysteriously disappeared.  Despite this abhorrence of needles, I am now vaccinated against hepatitis and typhoid, have started my prophylaxis for malaria, and have prescriptions to treat cholera. (Haiti is a dangerous place, infectious disease-wise.)

I also went in to take my mandatory annual tuberculosis skin test.  Turns out that the typhoid vaccine is a live virus, and you can't take a TB skin test if you are taking a live virus.  Golly gee whiz, did that upset me.  Terrible news.  Guess the evil employee health nurse will have to wait 'til another day to torture me with her needles.  I really couldn't have planned this better.



** Image from wwwp.greenwichmeantime.com   I did not draw or create this map, and thank the owners very much for letting me borrow it.**

Get off the plane

I thought there was an established etiquette about how to disembark from an airplane. These are the rules I thought were understood:  

Rule 1: We unload from the front of the plane to the back. Each row empties before the next row starts.  

This is slightly unfair as the people in the very front also got to board first. However, as they paid an additional couple hundred dollars to sit in plane seats with slightly more leg room and get free cheap alcohol, I can overlook this class seperation. This rule can be bent for the following subsets:

a) People who are in actual danger of missing their connecting flight. Few things are worse than dashing to your gate to watch your plane taxi away in front of you. These people can get off first. Pretending to have a close connection just to get off sooner is evil. I have faith these people will be punished at some point by actually having a close connection and missing it.  

b) People with screaming children. For goodness sake, let them off the blipping plane. They aren't making it more pleasant for anyone by staying on the plane, and if you had a bladder that small you would scream to go potty too.  

c) Medical emergencies and women who have decided to go into labor on the plane. They win. Always. It cannot be bent because you are in the back of the plane, impatient, and want to scurry off the plane in a sad attempt to 'win' by starting your three hour layover ahead of everyone else. 

Rule 2: Help old people, small people, and people carrying small people with getting luggage down.  

Don't look blankly at the four foot eleven eighty year old woman who is struggling to open the overhead compartment. Help her. Or else you deserve to have items that may have shifted during takeoff and landing fall on your head. Karma, my friend. Enjoy the reverse Samsonite logo tattoo on your forehead.  

Rule 3: If you have luggage stored more than two or three (although three is pushing it) overhead bins behind your seat, you have to wait to get it. You cannot elbow your way back through the crowds. This is only acceptable if you may miss your connection. See Rule 1. I understand it may not be your fault it is so far back. Maybe some other doofuses filled up the bins around you with their winter coats so you had to use one farther away. I understand, but I don't care. Wait.  

Rule 4: When it is your turn, get off the plane.  

This one sounds easy. It is apparently not. Please look for your keys/makeup/cellphone/flask, fix your hair/makeup/nails, and text/email your spouse/lover/friend/archnemesis after your feet have hit the actual airport carpet. Not in the plane aisle and, for heavens sake, not in the jetway as soon as you get off the plane. This makes me (and most everyone behind you) think thoughts that involve bodily harm to your person. I have to then repent of those thoughts. Which makes me angrier at you.  

Those are the main ones. Four rules. Teach your children, your friends, your sister. I'm pleading with you.

"I've got a touch of hangover bureaucrat. Don't push me."

Pup has an internal alarm clock that gets us both up around 6:00 a.m. Unfortunately for me, it does not have a snooze button. Four hours of sleep, and we were up and back on the road.

I dislike the idea of bumper stickers. I can swallow one or two on a vehicle, especially if they are work or military related. I get those. I actually like it when a car has twenty or thirty on the back door. It’s a friendly notification that the two of us will probably never be friends. Then there are the cars with bumper stickers whose messages are belied by the driver’s behavior. I particularly hate those. I offer for reference the woman with the ‘hang up the phone and drive’ sticker who was talking on her phone and driving fifteen miles under the speed limit on a two-lane highway for about fourteen point seven miles. She was annoying me doubly – stupid driving habits and stupid bumper stickers. I muttered an ancient curse upon her back tires and passed at the first opportunity.

Usually I am in a hurry to arrive at my destination and blow by all the roadside attractions, but not this time. Pup and I stopped at every brown-signed tourist stop we passed. Jesse James’ birthplace – we saw it. George Washington Carver monument – we were there. Harry Truman’s birthplace – check. If there had been a sign for America’s largest ball of yarn, we would have stopped.

One of our first detours was John Wayne’s birthplace. It was a precious little white farmhouse draped in American flags. I loved it. The sidewalk was made of bricks donated by people from around the world, famous and not so famous. Someone had a van with murals of John Wayne covering all the sides.

While we were there, we met a group of bikers headed to Louisiana. I admired their bikes, and they admired pup. (She is rather pretty, but I’m rather biased.) We exchanged favorite John Wayne quotes. (Mine is from McLintock, in case you were wondering.) It was a lovely ten minutes.

My excellent sense of direction took us the wrong way out of town. We had turned down a gravel road (because all gravel roads eventually come to pavement or end thus bringing your lostness to a conclusion, though not always a satisfying one). We crested a hill and there it was, rural Midwest Americana at its finest. Cornfields on one side, beans on the other, a creek dividing the two, and a red-sided, one-lane, covered bridge awash in sunlight. We had stumbled on a covered bridge of Madison County. We took a break to stretch our legs and wandered down to the creek side. There was a man taking photographs of the bridge. He looked up as we came down the hill. He held up the camera.

“Do you mind?” I tilted my head quizzically. “May I shoot you two?”

I smiled and agreed. He snapped a few photos, and we chatted for a few minutes. Clint Eastwood, he was not. He was a very nice man shooting some of the bridges for a piece for a magazine though. We discussed pup (who was being a doofus and pointing dragonflies), and he gave me a tip on a good restaurant for lunch in a nearby town.

Iowa is better than I previously thought.

Hourly rate

I finished summer classes on Wednesday. While attempting eighteen master’s level hours in ten weeks was not my best idea, it doesn’t matter. Fait accompli. I grabbed my favorite boots, a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, my swimsuit, and a sundress, loaded pup in the car, and headed south. Nothing restores a girl’s spirit like a road trip. It was well after dark by the time we made it out of the city. It also happened to be storming. I flipped the wipers on high and kept driving. At one point the rain was coming down so hard the road lines were obscured. I toyed with the idea of pulling over under an overpass and sleeping the storm out but pressed onward. We drove through two tornado-producing storms on our way to the hotel that night. Two. Perhaps the overpass idea had merit.

We finally made it to our pre-booked accommodations around 1:30 in the morning. Pup was being a brat, I was exhausted, and all I wanted was a bed and pillow for a few hours. As I was pulling into the parking lot, I noted the room doors were on the outside of the buildings. In my past experience, that has never been a good sign. The lobby door was locked, so I rang the bell – five times. A rumpled man emerged from a back room rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“How much did you pay for the room?” he asked.

“I have no idea. DH paid for it online. Forty?” He eyed me suspiciously.

“It will be fifty five dollars then, plus tax. If you have a pet, it’s twenty more plus a hundred dollar room cleaning fee if she destroys something. You are on the second floor.”

I eyed him suspiciously. “She’ll be sleeping in the car.”

I grabbed my bag and the key. A wave of musty air hit me as I opened the door. A queen bed with two flat pillows took the majority of the space. A wall mounted lamp cast a yellow glow over a lonely towel, washcloth, and bar of soap resting atop a spindly brown table. The TV was directly from the 1960’s. I did some quick math and determined there was not a hundred dollars worth of objects pup could destroy unless she managed to maul the questionable mattress to a timely death. I thought about going back to get her but decided against since she was sleeping quite happily.

I have been on many a trip where a layer of road grime was part of the allure, but I desperately wanted to shower and brush my teeth that night. There was a tiny problem with my plan. The shower was still wet, the curtain was half pulled, and there was a special something floating in the loo. (Did I use loo appropriately or does it mean the entire bathroom? I’ve wondered that.) I looked back at the bed suspiciously. The motel did rather have the feel of a ‘rent-by-the-hour’ place.

I just would have rather they cleaned the rooms between the hours. I switched rooms, and pup upgraded from the car to the motel room – pet fee waived.

Well, I made it to Amsterdam.

Well, I made it to Amsterdam. To the amazement of my flight neighbor and stewardess, I slept through the whole flight. Apparently they tried to awaken me a few times, but I was having none of that. Benadryl is awesome. Woke up fifteen minutes before landing. Thank goodness - I awoke to rows of over caffeinated teenagers bound to Africa on a mission trip.

"I hope they speak English b/c otherwise they won't know what we're saying." "Do you think they have iPods?" My personal favorites though "Your passport is red- did you dye it? Oh, it's cause you're from Holland?......pause..... Do you wear wooden shoes?"

I found myself in an Ikea upon disembarking or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Who knew they designed the airport AND the stores? No jet lag yet though I'm sure it's coming.

Getting to the hotel was a nightmare. The metro system seems very effective, but incredibly confusing at first. Also there seems to be a lot of residual Communist anger... No one has yet to be friendly, no one smiles, and all service is given begrudgingly.

My jeans are about three sizes too big for me in this part of Europe, I wear far too little eye makeup, and I smile too much. It's like I have American tatooed on my forehead- I stick out something fierce.