Well it looks like my "every two week" posts have turned into monthly posts, but this time when I came here last week the power was working but the internet was down. Go figure. At least I'm getting lots of exercise walking hither and yon.

Since I last wrote MUCH has happened.

St. Paddy's came and went with perhaps less rocking with Good Craic than I've been used to in previous years, but just as much Guinness. Speaking of which, it's Guinness' 250th birthday this year so they put it in fancy new bottles. I know, the excitement never ends.

In other life-changing news I assisted with my first delivery the other week. It was a medium pepperoni with extra cheese...haha no, a beautiful healthy baby boy. The whole thing was just incredible, and I have to say I was happy to be the one assisting rather than the new mother. I don't know how women do it. Really. When the wee face first appeared it was completely motionless and had a grayish hue, I was really worried that it was a still-birth. Then suddenly when the shoulders emerged the baby sprung to life and began flailing and screaming, it was really wonderful. When the baby was all cleaned off he was placed on a bed opposite his mother and there was a moment when they both looked at each other with fascination and satisfaction. It was a magical moment. When the placenta came out, I must admit that a certain song started running through my head ("Placenta: you're my nutrition sac...") but I managed to restrain myself. The midwife let me bring the new baby (Joseph Kojo) over to his mother for the first time. "Aya ko" (I-yak-oh: Congratulations) I told her, and she replied "ya yay" - thank you.

Last week I was part of a nation-wide campaign to "Kick Polio out of Ghana" - after recent outbreaks of the virus. Over the 6 days (Monday through last Saturday) we inoculated almost 1800 under five-year olds against polio BY FOOT!! The worthiness of the cause was an essential motivator, because it was hard work! We just covered the villages surrounding the clinic, but there were no roads, so we'd be tramping up dry river beds, through plantain patches, over hill and dale and hither and thither until we had vaccinated usually about 280 kids per day. It took EIGHT SOLID HOURS. A typical immunization went something like:
Lug the medicine container (and our hurtin' bodies) up a gravelly hill, ask the inhabitants at the top if there are any children under 5, hear "dabbi - no, but there are up that other hill over there." Then whether we'd immunized or not we'd write U2 on the house in chalk in honour of the band. And to indicate that the house had received full immunization if applicable. When we reached a house with children of the appropriate age (and we reached at least 100 of them (as some had multiple babies) I would, more often than not, be met with the screams of sheer terror from the children I was sent to help. I mean obviously the white monster has come to steal your soul. Sometimes I would call, in a very friendly voice "I'm gonna eat you!" - no one understood me but at least the children's crying was rendered legit. Then I would (sometimes through extreme tribulation) get the two small drops into the baby's mouth - the two simple drops that were the whole point of this venture. After the drops I would take my indelible marker and "paint" the nail of the left index finger to indicate that the struggling child was now fully immunized against polio and would have one fewer thing to struggle against in this tough world. The fingernail was only painted often with comparable (and sometimes greater) effort as administering the drops, which I can appreciate, as a marker does quite resemble a tenticled demonic claw. The downside of terrifying the beejeesus out of beautiful little children is that now my hands are covered in permanent ink and live polio. Once the child was "marked" (like Kane) he was "registered" (like all the people of Nazareth before Jesus was born) on the tally sheet then the house was marked (with chalk, not sheep's blood) so that polio (not the Holy Ghost or the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come or whatever) would pass over the house without killing the first born or any-borns. So, as you see our work was purely Biblical and my birthday being a month before Jesus' is not pure coincidence. Anyway it was honestly a great time! I think I could have survived without doing 6 solid days of it, but maybe some of the kids we vaccinated, couldn't have.

I'm quickely running out of time, so I throw in my personal bits:

I finished Machievelli's "The Prince" which was certainly worth restarting. I read "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" and found it to be horrendously clichéd but somewhat thought-provoking and highly immersive, and I read "Where there are no doctors - A Village Handbook for Africa" which I loved even more than the BC Health Guide (one of my favorite books).