How To Stay Warm in Lesotho Considering 25 Degree Lows and No Heat

1. Don the “second skin”, consisting of Underarmor Heatgear long sleeve shirt and compression pants.  The second skin is a prime defender against cold and is worn at all times of day except working out and showering. For the feet, regular cotton socks for now.

2. Since the Underarmor aren’t really clothes, now add everyday clothing – long sleeve T-shirt (or Rice U Athletic Department issued extra-warm polo.  Thank you Richie and Kelly!) and jeans if we’re going to work, or sweatshirt and sweat pants if we’re at home.  Add a layer of fuzzy warm socks from Brookstone (They seemed like a weird Christmas present from your brothers when you lived in Houston, but now they are life savers.).

3. Crawl into sleeping bag designed to keep a person warm down to 30 degrees.  At this point, you have the option of wearing a fleece hat, or pulling the sleeping bag over your head.  I reccommend the sleeping bag option, the hat doesn’t cover your nose.

4. Cover sleeping bag with down comforter.

5. Use electric heater to warm up before going to bed, if necessary.

5.  Sleep toasty!

 

Laundry Day

I did my laundry this weekend, which usually wouldn’t be a minor life triumph except that the most mundane tasks here are triumphs.  First, we realized that the drain hose wasn’t connected to anything when we heard a weird water splashy noise as the machine drained soapy water on the bathroom floor.  We let it drain into the toilet until we found the real drain for it, then everything was okay.  There also are no dryers here (actually, dryers don’t really exist outside of America, I’ve learned.  They didn’t have any in Paris when I visited there two years ago.).  So we hung our laundry on the clothes line outside, and 4 hours later, I have dry shirts! The jeans might take another 4,000 hours, but that’s okay.

Everyone hangs their laundry on lines or on fences.  The brightly colored clothes swaying in the breeze decorates the landscape that is otherwise dominated by dusty brown earth, faded green trees, and the yellow-brown of dead leaves.  The clothes also serve as a reminder to me of the common humanity shared across the world.  Regardless of where you live or what station you occupy in society, everyone has to do laundry, and it has to get dried.

 

That One Time When Grace Realized She Was Sheltered

I was talking to a bunch of 16 year old girls.  One of them had a 6″ steak knife looking thing on her desk, and my sheltered no-tolerance-accustomed mind panicked and said, “What are you doing with that knife?”  And the girl, who was very sassy and funny, picked it up like she was going to stab someone with it and whirled around and said, “This is so I can kill anybody who tries to rape me when I come to school!” And the other 7 or 8 girls who were sitting around us all started giggling.  Absolutely bewildered, I looked at the other girls and said, “Wait, you all have knives like this?”  They nodded and about four of them pulled out their own knives, although most of these were the pocket variety that snapped shut.  They demonstrated how their mothers taught them to kill their attackers my stabbing them in the throat.  Then, my sassy friend turned to me and said, “But you know, sometimes we don’t kill them.  Sometimes we let them live but cut off their…” and made a gesturing motion towards an imaginary attacker’s groin.  This sent the girls around her into hysterics.  She proceeded to tell me how difficult it is to cut one off, but that she has gotten very good at it.  I decided to pick up the game and teased her back for a while, until the conversation ended when a group of boys walked in the classroom.

 

The Lost Incubator

This morning, Robby, M’e Belina, and I set out to Q2, the government run hospital, to check up on the incubators that students last summer built and donated to three area hospitals.  Tomorrow, we will visit Morija and St. Josephs, two smaller private hospitals, to check on their incubators.

I won’t depress you with my experience of Q2.  I know Danielle discussed it in her blog post, and if you want to know more, email me and I’ll send you what I wrote of it in my journal.  To give you an idea of the functionality of the hospital, here is a summary of the Lesotho Times article entitled “Queen 2 On It’s Knees”.  There aren’t enough beds, no heating, no backup generator (so no surgeries in case the power goes out, which it has twice already) no ICU, no antibiotics, no pain meds, no vitamins, no liters of saline, doctors and nurses that are understaffed and haven’t been paid in months, leaking ceiling and molding walls.  The government is building a new hospital across the street from the Baylor Clinic, and the moment cannot come soon enough that Q2 closes its doors.

In terms of the incubator, no one in the maternity ward or the nursery (basically the NICU, any baby that wasn’t in a life threatening condition was with it’s mother for lack of beds) had seen the incubator BTB interns brought last year.  They remembered meeting students and hearing promise of an incubator, but never saw it.  This strongly contrasts with what M’e Belina remembers, which was that students dropped off a finished incubator at Q2.

We will reevaluate our incubator building project after visiting the other two hospitals.  For those who don’t follow this incubator story, I apologize and let me back up.  One of the first projects BTB worked on was a cost efficient incubator.  Keeping newborns adequately warm is an important factor in their health, and it is an easy problem to fix.  Together with senior Bioengineers, the first Hot Cot was developed consisting of a basic plywood box with a plexiglass lid.  The box is divided in half lengthwise with a piece of plywood that becomes the bed for the baby (with a pad on it, of course), and underneath the bed are four lightbulbs mounted to the wall of the box.  Using the inefficiency of the lightbulbs and a specific air flow pattern, the lightbulbs warm the incubator up to standard baby warmth temperature (around 85 or 90 degrees, I believe, but don’t quote me).  The whole thing is made with easily available materials, and for under $100.  It’s an amazing project and has the potential to save many lives.

Someone remarked the other day that Masianokeng High School chose a really depressing slogan for their school, “Aluta Continua,” meaning “The struggle continues.”  But really, I cannot think of any more apt slogan for the entire country.  It’s realistic.  Aluta Continua.