running

Today I ran for the first time since before David and I got married.  Three years and more. 

It felt so good.

I’ve had this impulse to start running again for months; a restlessness that would strike me in the early mornings, an urge to get 20 minutes’ strenuous relaxation – a momentary pause from my life as a mother, from the dishes, from the laundry.  Just breathing in and breathing out, hearing my feet crunch on the sandy road, and feeling awake and refreshed from these few moments in the fresh air and new day.

I didn’t think it was possible until I read my friend Coreyanne’s blog.  She spoke of running skirts, which I’d never really thought about.  I just knew that I couldn’t run without a skirt – because of the culture where I live.  I would need a skirt that reached well below my knees, and yet was designed for running.  The information that Corey posted on her blog spurred me to investigate.  My mother-in-law found a girl on Etsy advertising a handmade running skirt, who was willing to customize the length for me.  Better yet, it was half the price of the “name brand” running skirts out there (which weren’t even available in my size).

Suddenly things were coming tog ether, and I realized that my desire was being fulfilled.  The skirt was ordered, and my sister-in-law included it in the care package she sent us this month.  It arrived this week, a flowery and uplifting print, along with my athletic shoes which had been left in storage in the USA under the mistaken impression that I wouldn’t need them here.  The pieces were falling into place. 

I want to run early in the mornings, as soon as the sun is up.  When there are fewest people on the roads, out and about, and I have to deal with as little staring as possible.  They already think I am very strange for taking a walk with Marjanne every afternoon.  Zambians don’t comprehend the idea of walking for leisure.  Now they will see an even stranger sight – the ‘mzungu’ woman runs down the road as if she is fleeing a lion!  But if I go early, maybe I will even avoid having any early-bird students see me over their breakfast cup of tea. 

Ketzia accommodates me by getting up early in the mornings.  She is always awake sometime around or after 5am… too early.  I arrange to leave her with Sarah, to play in the bedroom while I am gone.  David is on “Elijah duty,” but Elijah never gets up as early as Ketzia, so it’s likely that David will get a bit more rest while I am gone.

The final arrangement is to borrow Sarah’s beautiful iPod.  I need a soundtrack for my exertion, to keep myself focused.  One of these days I  will get some music loaded onto my own mp3 player, but for today, I have fresh music to spur me down the sandy road, songs I’ve never heard before.

And so it comes together.  Ketzia wakes up at 5:47.  I nurse her briefly, to keep her happy until my return.  My alarm goes off at 5:50.  I take Ketzia into the bathroom so that she will be happy with Mommy in sight while I change into my new running skirt, put my shoes on, pull my hair up.  I drop Ketzia with sleepy Sarah for a cuddle, grab the iPod and earbuds, and take a  few swallows of water.

My dogs greet me ecstatically as I do some minor stretches in front of our gate.  I call Merry to join me, and leave Tuppence behind.  She is too wound up to run properly with me.  We walk rapidly towards the College sign, the entrance to the campus, building up steam.  At the sign I turn right onto the dirt and sand driveway which leads, 4kms later, to the tarmac road.  It is 6:07.  I settle into a slow, rhythmic  shuffle.  The music plays.  The breeze cools my face.  My dog trots alongside, delighted.

I’ve decided to start slow, so I run for 2 minutes, walk for 1 minute.  Rinse and repeat.  I feel encouraged that my body seems to remember how to do this.  Breathe in, breathe out.  No cramps arise.  The breathlessness is not so bad.  After two running cycles and two walking cycles I turn around.  There is no need to push myself too far on the first day, or I might hamper my progress by wearing myself out.  I retrace my steps in the freshness of the morning.  I don’t see a single person during my run, and return to the house renewed.  Time for a quick rinse in the shower, and then I collect my baby back.  Husband and son still sleeping.  The house is quiet.  And I even have to time to write a blog post about it.   I think this is the beginning of a positive life change!

I've agreed with my friend Mairi that I would say I've been holding off from posting so that she doesn't miss anything while she's here in Zambia with no internet access.  :-)

So this is just a quick note to say that I'm alive, and (as is obvious) I'm not able to blog much at present, for a number of reasons. Tomorrow we are going away for a long weekend. When I come back we'll be smack-dab right in the middle of our next women's conference, the preparations for which have been occupying me all week.  We've had sickness (cold/flu) making the rounds in our house for 2 weeks now, in conjunction with a 2-year-old who's cutting his molars and a teething 7-month-old, as well.  I am delighted to say that someone whom I've known for a very long time (longer than I've known my husband) is coming to nanny for me until October... Miss Sarah Moriah Barr.  I am SO excited, and so thankful, and so blessed.  Reinforcements are on the way and arriving next week...

More later...

a picnic.

Today Marjanne and I went for a picnic by the dam which is about 20 minutes’ drive from the College.  It is an earthen dam with a pretty blue lake next to it, and grasses blowing in the wind.  There is a narrow road which runs over the top of the dam, and we took this road a couple of months ago when David preached in one of the village churches beyond the dam.  At that time, since it was still the rainy season, the lake had overflowed across the road and we had to ford the waters in our truck. Thankfully it was not too deep and we were able to cross quickly without becoming stuck.

So today we decided to take the children and have a nice relaxing outing to the dam with some lunch. So we packed our baskets and brought our camp chairs and Marjanne drove us (in our vehicle – since I cannot drive, not having a Zambian license and not knowing how to drive a manual).  I brought a sun-umbrella hoping that we could sit under its shade, but sadly we couldn’t get it far enough into the ground and the wind was toppling it every time.  So, we gave up and just sat in the sun on a sandy spot next to the water’s edge, grateful that there were some clouds in the sky so that it was not blazing hot.

There can be parasites and other nasty things in the water, so even though the lake looked refreshing we did not go in.  Marjanne brought her sewing and enjoyed having something to do.  I spent the entire time alternating between chasing Elijah (who wanted to wander off) and consoling Ketzia, who hasn’t been feeling well because she is cutting teeth.  In between we ate our picnic lunch.  Marjanne brought leftover pizza from our outing yesterday as her treat, and I packed a bottle of Sprite and a bag of potato chips as a special treat to go with my sandwich!  

The thing about picnicking as a ‘mzungu’ (white person) is that you have to be prepared to be stared at and observed at length by every passer-by.  The first one to stop was a teenaged boy who recognized us from the time we went to the village church, and from Marjanne’s school visits.  He greeted us, and we had some chitchat.  Then he remained, observing us, for the next hour!  Eventually two other small girls, one with a very young baby on her back, timidly approached us as well.  We learned that the baby was less than 4 weeks old.  The small girl was babysitting this tiny infant while the mother worked in the fields.  The baby woke and cried from hunger, and the little girl shushed it back to sleep because the mother wasn’t back from the fields yet. By this time the boy who was observing us had collected a large rock to use as a seat, and arranged himself comfortably next to Elijah’s camp chair, playing with the two trucks I brought for Elijah’s amusement.  Meanwhile we were also getting attention from passers-by…

We stayed for about an hour and a half, and when we had eaten our lunch and the children were getting tired we packed up.  It must have seemed so funny to these staring villagers, these silly mzungu women who bring baskets of food and sit and look at the water!  As Marjanne was backing the truck up we got stuck in the sandy road and the tires were spinning. So I got out and with the help of the boy who was still observing us, we managed to push while Marjanne accelerated and with some significant effort we got the vehicle to move and were on our way. I gave him a biscuit package in thanks for his help.  It was nice to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine for a little while even though I didn’t get to “relax.”  :)

Today is the beginning of our second Women’s Conference for this year.  This time we are hosting the wives of Covenant College alumni.  CC now has about 60 graduates (not sure of the exact number) so we could get anywhere from 20-50 women or so.  We hope many will join us for this conference, which begins this afternoon and ends on Saturday afternoon.   So far, at the time I'm posting this, 6 ladies have shown up and we are waiting for more to arrive!

Today has been frantically busy – printing schedules, menu, and Bible study materials, arranging details with Nelson (the cook and all-around assistant for these events), preparing the dormitory, etc.  On the home front, I've been running back and forth to the potty with Elijah, then next on the list was sorting out the next size of cloth nappies for Ketzia who has outgrown the ones she’s currently in.  Then sorting out the next size of clothing, and packing the ones she’s outgrown into storage.  

Ketzia has picked today to cut her first tooth, so she has been very unhappy the whole day long.  My plan is to get her settled in bed for the night (she's usually asleep by 6:30pm) and then welcome the ladies for the first evening session where I will be leading a Bible study.  My original plan was to do a study on Prayer, but I have not been able to get it to come together in time, because of my own mental fatigue combined with needy children and very limited time, so instead I will be reusing one of the Bible studies I taught in March (it's a different group of ladies this time).  That is the essence of having children and a household to care for -- it makes you flexible.

I have discovered that chocolate apparently gives me headaches now, which is totally depressing...

But, I will end with an encouraging note from our potty training saga with Elijah: Elijah woke up from his nap with a full nappy, as usual.  He was playing around with his cars and suddenly said, “Mama!  Pee-pee!”  So I said, “Quick, let’s go to the potty!”  We went running to the potty and I had every expectation that he would have just peed in his nappy by the time we got there, especially since it was already wet from his nap.  But nope… he took his nappy off, sat down on his potty and peed!  He was so proud of himself, “Yay!” he said, giving me a fabulous smile.  He’s caught onto the idea so fast….  Twice after that he felt the urge and immediately told me and took off for the bathroom, but unfortunately didn’t quite make it in time, however we reassured him that the recognition and the effort are what counts!

Scourby-sleep, email, and James 1:5

We have now begun putting Elijah to bed listening to Alexander Scourby's reading of the Bible on CD.  During my childhood years I fell asleep every night listening to Scourby on cassette tape, so it is really special to me that my child(ren) will be doing the same as they grow up.  It is heartwarming to hear Elijah say, "Bah-bul! Bah-bul!" excitedly as we tuck him into bed.  It is so true that children go through phases in their sleep patterns.  Elijah has always been a "bad" sleeper, since he was born.  We have wrestled and cried and soothed and rocked and nursed and comforted and sat through screaming for hours, and even as he has gotten older he has struggled, but gradually improved.  For the last few months he has done really, really well and got to the point where naptimes and bedtimes were a joy.  We were beginning to breathe a sigh of relief and really relax... and then within the past couple days he's had another regression.  This usually calls for a switch of something in the bedtime routine to get him settled again, thus, the introduction of Scourby to encourage him to fall asleep calmly listening to God's Word!

It's tough being a parent.  (It's even tougher when you feel so far away and so disconnected from everyone you would love to ask advice of and learn from.)  The Lord has been laying some things on my heart and I have been prompted to really start making personal correspondence much more of a priority than it has been up to this point.  It is so easy to think "I really don't have time to send that person an email" or to forsake writing personal letters of any kind except the most urgent and business-like.  The longer I live here in Eastern Province, the more I wish I could benefit from the wealth of knowledge and examples of Scriptural family life and marriages that are represented by couples in my acquaintance. So, I am determined to seek out fellowship to the extent that it can be found through the medium of email.  I am also going to make every effort to keep this blog updated on a regular basis!

I don't usually post anything on my blog on the Lord's Day, so I want to be sure to keep this focused where it should be.  I am trying to prepare a Bible study on the topic of Prayer for the upcoming Women's Conference here at the College this week.  One of the verses I am considering is James 1:5, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given to him."  As I am pondering this verse the biggest question that comes to me is, How do you know when the Lord has answered your prayer?  How do you recognize the wisdom when it is given to you?  How do you really know when you are making a wise decision?  I guess as a young mom, it's easy to feel like I'm floundering along in the responsibilities and challenges and not quite knowing how to make my way without a clear guide... and, conversely, struggling with guilt or the feeling of inadequacy when I know I've made a mess of it.  So, speak up!  How has this verse been proved to be true for you?

Language

Last night at dinner Elijah leaned forward excitedly.  “Boh! Boh!”  That’s his word for Pooh, aka Winnie the Pooh, which he has recently been introduced to by way of a fun pillowcase and the Pooh character on his nappies and his new dummy (pacifier).  Elijah was pointing at the mug I was using, which has Pooh on it.  Clever boy!  Then he said, “Owies, Boh, owies!”  He saw that there were honeybees depicted next to Pooh.  Honeybees = “owies” in Elijah’s vocabulary (even more so here, where our standard honeybees are African Killer bees).

This very cute incident illustrates what communicating with Elijah is like.  His vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds, but we have been amused to see that his “words” come in different ways.  More and more he is learning to repeat words as he hears us saying them, or use the point-and-identify tactic.  However, he also mixes in sign language and sometimes simply makes an onomatopoeic sound which serves as the word. 

For instance, “airplane” is NEVER repeated as a word.  Rather, he “says” airplane by going “Wooo, woh, woh, woooo” and flying his hand through the air.  

The same with “snake,” which he says by making a gutteral growling/biting noise and hitting his chest (explanation: we have told him that snakes will bite him, and so his brain interprets the word by signing “bite” with sound effects).  And yes, we are working VERY hard to teach him about snakes – and YES, he has actually identified snakes without any prompting or assistance using this method. 

Some things he simply signs, like “wash hands.”

He is also becoming bilingual, gradually picking up Nyanja words and phrases as he is picking up English ones.  When he says “thank you”, a full 50% of the time he says “koko” which is the Elijah-ization of “zekomo.”  The other half of the time he says “dank oo.”  :-)  He has also been heard saying “iwe!” which his friends are often shouting at each other (“you! You!”).  And he has made several attempts to say “bwanji” in greeting.

And at least although he does say "NO!" very emphatically, he says it so adorably!

baby girl.

My baby girl, who is 5 months old today, is literally zooming around the house in her baby walker.  At 4 months old she figured out this walking thing and she’s going for it, without passing “GO!”, without collecting $200.  

This is surprising, sure.  Yet I know that some babies walk early, so it’s not this huge deal.   

BUT.  

Ketzia has also figured out that she can reach things by leaning over the tray on the walker and grabbing them.  She has discovered the curtains, the tablecloth, and anything else dangling or sitting with her reach.

 The other day I was making dinner and looked around to see that she was pulling the extremely heavy, 9-inch-in-diameter lid to my large cast iron pot off the cupboard shelf.  I quickly rushed over and caught the iron pot lid just before it crashed down onto her toes.  “Baby, what are you doing?”  I said.  Surely this is a fluke! Surely my 5-month-old didn’t just manage to slide a cast iron pot lid over the edge of the cupboard shelf by pulling it as she leaned over her tray. We moved on with our day and the incident was forgotten.

 

But oh, no.  Baby goes back into the kitchen today.  She walks to the kitchen cupboard.  She sees the fascinating iron pot lid. She reaches for it and pulls the thing to the edge of the shelf again!  Thankfully I again walked into the kitchen just in time to avert crushed toes.   

Nope, not a fluke.  

I wouldn’t believe that she was capable of pulling a heavy piece of cast iron if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.  My daughter apparently has supernatural upper body strength for a 5-month-old and brains to go with it.   

Now the pot lid is going to live on the bottom shelf where it is below her reach.

facts.

I have neglected my blog.  However, I think that when I say that we've only had 2 days without house guests and/or dinner company in the past 34 days... maybe you will understand.  :)

We are no longer without power 3 days each week!!!  Hooray!!  We still have occasional "load shedding" blackouts in the evenings for a couple of hours, and the electricity is often still too weak to turn on the internet at some periods during the day, but wow.... it is so nice to have electricity again 7 days each week! We are thanking God that this situation resolved much sooner than we expected it to!

This morning our dog Merry found a lizard in our hallway.  He loves (eating) lizards so he was chasing this one up and down the hallway.  Eventually he knocked off its tail, which started wildly writhing around on the floor.  I thought Elijah would be frightened, but instead he burst into laughter and started dancing wildly around it, trying to stomp on it and jump on it!  Hearing her brother's hysterical laughter, Ketzia (who was in my arms) starting laughing hysterically also. It was funny.

We only have one dog now.  Our older dog, Saurus, became very badly behaved and completely unmanageable.  It is true that you can't teach an old dog new tricks.  So we gave him away and hopefully he will be happy in his new home.  Our remaining dog, Merry, who is 1 year old, is a marvelous pet.  We will probably get a second puppy sometime soon to keep Merry company.

We have two children teething at the same time.  I am finding that my chitenge comes in handy, because I often am "wearing" at least one of my children!  They find it extremely comforting.  No wonder the African women are always wearing their babies on their backs.  It makes my shoulders very sore, but at least it soothes the screaming.  :)

Elijah is going through a hard stage just now, because he is nearly two.  Can I say that I understand how it is that at this almost-age they become raving little monsters?  No.  All I can say is, I never thought a child of mine would behave this way.  I always thought those were the badly behaved children whose mothers spoiled them. But apparently it happens with the "good" children, too, the ones who are consistently disciplined.  Shows what I know!

Ketzia is going through a hard stage just now, too.  Thankfully hers doesn't involve throwing tantrums and screaming until she is blue in the face.  Hers is the frustration that comes with becoming more mobile.  She can roll over, but sometimes she ends up hurting herself by so doing.  She can scoot across the floor by pushing with her feet, but she can't crawl.  She is just mobile enough that she gets wedged into tight spaces, and gets very frustrated.

We have two weeks to go before this semester ends, and David and I are both feeling a bit burnt-out, but the end is in sight!  We are working on a newsletter to send out, hopefully within the next couple of days.  I'm having computer issues, which is another factor in the newsletter delay and the absence of blog posts.  But I will try to keep up with the blog posts (now that the electricity is on 7 days a week, that will be easier).

eggplant. and life.

I was doing so well updating my blog every other day or so.  Ah well, time to gather up the slack again. 

 the driveway leading past the College buildings to our house

 

In the market today, I bought an eggplant as big as Elijah's head!  I've never before cooked with eggplant.  It had always scared me, as a vegetable, because I knew that if it wasn't cooked or prepared correctly it could be a real, total, complete, inedible flop. So I've always been a bit wary of eggplant. But last week, there were no other vegetables to be found in the market.  No green beans, no green peppers, no carrots, no nothin'.  Piles and piles of eggplant everywhere. So I looked at the eggplant, and maybe the eggplant looked at me, and I decided that would have to be our vegetable for the week.  So I took it home, and did some reading, and didn't find too many interesting looking recipes - but the week before, our College cook, Nelson, had made a very tasty dish of eggplant to accompany the nshima and beans at lunch. So I asked him how he cooked it.  Nelson's cooking instructions are never very detailed, but I managed to come pretty close to replicating this time... and added a bit of garam masala for flavor... and it was nice! We've had it a couple times more since then and this week I couldn't resist buying the eggplant that was as big as Elijah's head.

 daddy reading to Elijah and Ketzia

I'm happy to report that we are all much healthier than the last time I wrote.  It's been a month of much bleh-ness which seemed to affect all 4 of us differently, but thankfully now it seems to be passing and we are all regaining our bouncy good health again.

 Elijah with a few of our students who came for dinner

The main problem with keeping up anything online-related recently, be it email or blog or whatever, is that the electricity has not been good.  We are regularly without power for an entire day, about 3 times a week.  On the days when the power is on, it's often too weak to run the internet.  So... the brief periods when the internet is actually working have generally been spent dealing with whatever is quite urgent, but not quite having enough time to catch up on everything!  Oh, wow, yet another part of our life which is dealt with by "crisis management"!

 Elijah was reading aloud to Ketzia - as soon as I got the camera out, he got embarrassed!

The kids are doing fabulously.  Elijah, now that he has fully recovered from the chest infection or whatever it was that had laid him low for more than a week, is back to being his normal "cheeky" self as they would say in Scotland.  He is full of energy and zest for living.  He loves the students, he loves his friends, he has never ever ever met a fellow human being he didn't like.  His vocabulary is literally expanding every day.  Some of his new words this week have been "hiya" (genuine 'weegie!  I'm so proud...), "go" (said firmly to the dog), "dog", "eye", "guava" etc.  He is making a marvelous attempt to say his own name AND.... we are so proud of this... he is also trying to say "zekomo kwam biri" which is "thank you very much" in Nyanja!  Wow!  Elijah has also just moved into his very own "big boy" bed.  We ordered a bed made for him at the carpenter's complete with a bed rail.  He is so excited about it.  I am so happy for him that he has moved out of that tired travel cot which he had completely outgrown!  Now he has a very comfortable place to sleep.  I hope this means his sleep will improve now.  :)

notice Elijah's pose here, completely relaxed in his camp chair leaning his head against the table!

Things are right busy around here, as they always are, but we are finishing up the final preparations for the Trust meeting next week.  Our Scottish house guests arrive tomorrow -- in fact, as I write this, David is in Lusaka overnight and will be bringing them home with him tomorrow sometime.  So I am on my own with the two children overnight, I think for the first time since Ketzia was born!  It's amazing how rather lonely the College feels when you realize that your husband is away overnight, the students are all gone for the weekend, Marjanne has been in Lusaka for a few days on business, and suddenly it's just me and my children in our house, and across the way Phil in his house, and on the other corner Jackson in his house (his wife and kids are away in Lusaka until tomorrow, too).  And we're the only ones here. And it's quiet.  It's a bit sad.  But I'm happy there's still men around to provide a feeling of security to the place.

P.S. Did you notice our new sofas and armchairs in these photos??  Yes, the very ones that we spent 4 weeks trying to obtain!  They're HERE!  And we're so thankful to finally have adequate seating in our living room... especially since we're about to have a houseful of people for quite a while!

bleh.

Elijah was without a fever for another 24 hours and then during the night last night it came back for the 4th time in a week.  So this morning we took him back to the hospital to be checked out.  The pediatric doctor (a nice friendly girl from Edinburgh!) listened to his chest and said that he seems to have a chest infection.  She prescribed him an antibiotic and hopefully from here on out he'll be on the mend.  Later in the afternoon he perked up a bit and was playing around the house again, which was good to see.  Poor little guy, this is the first time since he had his "well baby" check up at 6 weeks old (the stupidest thing ever... why should I take my perfectly healthy child into a germ-ridden doctor's office so he can be poked and prodded and then proclaimed healthy and I can be patronized and treated like an imbecile first-time mother in the process?) that he's ever been to a doctor AND the first time he's ever been on an antibiotic!  Sniff.

Ketzia has developed a cough, too, and is full of sniffles.  I'm keeping a close eye on her and we're praying that she fights off this bug before it gets any worse.

An excerpt from an email to my mom tonight: "David and I are both utterly exhausted but, as usual, we're just frantically shifting from one urgent thing to the next, and every day is as frantic and packed full as it can possibly be.  Nothing is simple... for instance, this afternoon David went to take off the canopy from our truck bed so that he can pick up furniture on Monday. In the process (which should be a simple matter of unlatching and then lifting up the canopy and setting it down on the ground) he discovered that the truck company wired the rear brake light on the canopy through the canopy, so in order to remove the canopy he had to cut the cables and he will have to reattach them with electrical tape later!!  What should have been a few minutes' work turned into more than an hour.  Also we've discovered there's a problem with the plumbing in the guest room so now we have to get the plumber to come Monday morning... and our guest is arriving Monday night!" 


There's more, trust me, there's lots more.  But I will stop there.  It's been a really hard, distressing week in a lot of ways.  It's tempting to let it all get to me, become overwhelming.  But that wouldn't be living in faith according to the truth of Psalm 46 which we've been dwelling a lot on recently: "God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble... the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge."  There is much to take comfort in there!  And a very timely reminder that people will fail us and we will be faced with many difficulties, but in the midst of it, we should "be still and know that He is God."

another hospital experience

Elijah's been sick most of this week.  It started on Saturday afternoon, when we could tell he was obviously coming down with something -- fever, nasty cough, and runny nose.  That day I happened to have a fever, too, so we didn't think much of it.  We spent Sunday sick as a family because by then David was feeling unwell, too.  There's been a virus going around (fever, coughing, etc.).

And on Monday Elijah was up and running around again, his normal happy healthy self, and I thought he was over it. 

But then on Tuesday his fever came back and he spent the whole day sick again.  The good thing about Elijah is that he is marvelous about being sick -- he just completely mellows out, and lies down and lets the fever do its job.  He sleeps when he is sick.  He rests and lets his body fight.  I made him a pallet on the living room floor out of my yoga mat and a soft, cool, satiny blanket and his special pillow.  He liked lying there because the tile floor was cool and refreshing and he was still in the middle of the action, so when he would awaken from his feverish stupor Mama was always right there to reassure him. 

Then yesterday, Wednesday, he woke up again cheery and back to his normal self, no fever.  He took a short walk with me to the Farm to buy eggs, and on the way there he carried the empty egg tray and on the way back he carried the change from my purchase.  We ate lunch with the students, as usual, and later in the afternoon he saw his friends, too.

But today the fever returned suddenly and he was miserable all morning.  You could tell he felt so, so sick.  We were monitoring his temperature, as we always do, and watching it slowly rise.  At some point, since this was the third day of fever in 5 days, we decided to test him for malaria, even though he had no symptoms except fever.  Coughing and runny nose don't point to malaria, just a virus or flu of some kind.  The malaria test was negative, thankfully.  But then a couple hours later, his temperature was over 103* F, and that's when all the books tell you to go to the doctor (if they are under 3 years old).  So I called our doctor friend in Lusaka, Christine, to ask her advice.  Should we go to the more local hospital, an hour away, or did she think this was serious enough to come to Lusaka for the weekend and get Elijah more thoroughly checked out?  She recommended that we go to Katete and ask for blood tests to check his white blood cell count, and check his chest and lungs.  So in the midst of giving Elijah Calpol (Tylenol) and sponge-bathing him and giving him a lukewarm bath to bring down his temperature, we packed up the kids and the diaper bag and the water bottles and anything we might need for a long afternoon in a crowded hospital, and headed out immediately.  On the way to the hospital, I continued to monitor Elijah's temperature and it had come down as a result of our fever-reducing actions, which was encouraging.

We got to the hospital in the middle of a torrential downpour and despite having two umbrellas we still managed to get thoroughly drenched walking from the truck!  As we reached the front door of the clinic, surrounded by a deafening African rainstorm, David turned to me and said, "You know what? It's a public holiday.  I hope they're open!"  (I have written about our previous experience at this hospital here.) We opened the door to find... they were indeed closed.  Check-in was closed but at least there was one nurse inside to evaluate incoming patients and he told us they were still accepting people who needed to be admitted.  There was only one nurse/doctor on call and there was a small group of people waiting to see him, one by one.  We explained the situation with Elijah and the nurse said there was nothing he could do for us unless we wanted to have Elijah admitted.  The lab was closed, everything was closed.  I think we agreed pretty quickly that there was no reason to admit Elijah.  At the moment he was much more comfortable and his fever was very mild.  So we got the name and number of the nurse who helped us, in case we have to return tomorrow morning, and trudged back out through the downpour to our truck, and came home.

Elijah is now asleep in bed and we hope that he feels better when he wakes up in the morning.  When we laid him down his fever was under control but it was obvious he was still not feeling 100%.  Hopefully after a night of rest he will be okay.  If he isn't, we will take him back to the hospital.  Neither of us were concerned that this is anything serious, we just felt it was better to be safe then sorry and to take action when his temperature rose higher than is safe.  But what we both find unbelievable is that on a Zambian public holiday, they close the hospital.  What, so sick people take a holiday from needing doctors?  What irony, that on "International Women's Day" we should close the hospitals so that more village women can die without proper medical attention.  I am relieved that they at least were still allowing people to be admitted if necessary, but still that seems (to me) like saying, "Closed today, come back when you're dying."