Ben and I met a woman from the US that lives here full time and has an OB/GYN office here. She was at dinner with us tonight and she said that we can go in tomorrow afternoon (assuming she doesn’t have any emergencies) to have an ultrasound to find out if the baby is a boy or a girl. YEA! We’re super excited to get to see the baby again! Please pray that everything goes well and that things look good!

Good news! I found a meal that I consider a success! I made Mac and Cheese last night with a slightly varied recipe because we could only find Parmesan cheese in the store, but it was really good. Ben says he liked the soup better, but I know that I am right. 🙂

I have been very busy at the Sally Test Center. We go in the morning around 9 and I stay until Ben is done with work at 5. We dance with the kids from 10-11 and 2-3 each day. The rest of the time is spent playing, holding babies and planning lessons and dances. It’s really nice to be busy during the day and to be able to use my skills in a helpful way.

I have already completely fallen in love with one of the abandoned babies (I know, you’re all shocked). Her name is Eden and she is SO cute. They are guessing she’s about 10 months. She was found alone and brought to the hospital at the end of August because she was so malnourished. She is doing really well and is crawling some and will pull herself up on my legs to get me to pick her up. She likes to stick her tongue out at me so that I will stick mine out at her, then she tries to grab my tongue. The Sally Test Center closes at 4 but since Ben doesn’t finish work until 5, I sit in the waiting area in the peds wing and hold her. When the babies leave the STC at 4, they are put two to a “crib” in the wings. I will have to take a picture of the wings. They are shocking. No private rooms just rows of beds. And the cribs are like cages. One of the peds docs told me that during the night (from 4pm-8am) no one holds the babies and they rarely have diaper changes because the nurses are so busy. It’s really sad and when Ben comes and I have to put Eden back in her crib she cries and cries and I want to join her (but I’ve only done it once).

Anyway, I’m trying to come up with a great plan for a way to adopt her before we come home in December. Any great ideas? All suggestions are welcome! Hope you enjoy the new pictures!

Well, we made it to Eldoret! We flew Friday morning (left our hotel at 4:30am) from Cape Town to Johannesburg and then spent about six hours sitting in the NWA lounge in Jo’burg which was really nice. We then flew from Jo’burg to Nairobi and got in on Friday night. We had a bit of a rough night in Nairobi between the phone call at 1am and the strange old man that thought his friends were staying in our room. He rang the doorbell four times between 5 and 6am. Saturday morning was spent in a meeting with some people from CHAK (Christian Hospital Association of Kenya) explaining the benefits of using OpenMRS in their hospitals (I played a vital role in the conversations as you can imagine).

We flew to Eldoret Saturday afternoon and made it to our new “home” in time for dinner. We lucked out and were invited to dinner at the Chinese restaurant in town by Joe Mamlin (the man who runs the program here). Sunday we tried to sleep in but between the rooster crowing from 4am-11am, the dogs barking all night and day and the gates opening and closing that didn’t really happen. We went grocery shopping (an interesting experience) and then I set up our room while Ben worked. The plan was that I would do a lot of cooking here which is why we needed a kitchen but the cooking has not been a huge success. This is mostly because we have no way of measuring anything and we don’t have any basic ingredients that you might find in the US. So far I’ve attempted spaghetti and tomato soup and both were edible but far from delicious.

Ben worked today. He really had it rough, sitting outside on a covered porch enjoying the sunshine and light breeze while “working”. I got up at 7:45 and headed with two other women to the Sally Test Center. We danced ourselves into puddles of sweat with the kids there then walked the 15 minutes back to the IU House where we had lunch then walked the 15 minutes back and spent the afternoon dancing some more. Ben met me at the hospital and we walked another 10 minutes into town to do some more grocery shopping.

My poor little pregnant body is exhausted. My feet and ankles are swollen, I had to hold my hand in the freezer to get my wedding rings off because they were cutting my skin, and my toes look like stuffed sausages. However, I want it noted that at 4 1/2 months pregnant I was leaping and twirling and doing arabesques which impressed everyone that were there. The good news is that we won’t be dancing as much everyday starting next week.

We have been so busy that we haven’t even had time to take any pictures of our house. We will post pictures soon so that you can see where and how we’re living!

We have had a pretty busy few days here in Monkey Valley. On Friday night we went in to Cape Town for dinner and drinks. (One of us had more dinner and one of us had more drinks). It was fun to the see variety of people here and the similarities and differences between a city in South Africa and a city in the US. On Saturday we drove down the coast toward Cape Point. We stopped at several places along the way and had dinner right by the water where we got to see a whale.
The conference began on Sunday and quiet Monkey Valley is now filled with the clicking of geeks typing and deep discussions about modules and reports. I have attended several of the sessions, a couple intentionally and a couple unintentionally. I’ve seen Ben present four times and it’s very fun to watch him work.
I think Ben had high hopes that his programming knowledge had been leaking into me and that I would really wow people this week with my computer skills. I have to say that I can talk the talk. I know all of the lingo and can follow a conversation, but my lack of nerdiness was confirmed yesterday. I attended a presentation that Ben did on synchronization (which I think I figured out is something about making sure that all of the clinics have the same patient information) and Ben kept talking about this ‘parent’ and ‘child’ and ‘siblings’ and the entire time I thought it was so nice that he was actually talking about people and what OpenMRS does for real, living people. Unfortunately I figured out about ten minutes before the presentation ended that those were also computer terms (although I don’t know what they mean).
The good news is that we now know for sure that Ben is a geek and I never will be and I think we are both happy to be what we are and to not be what we aren’t. I have to say though that after watching some of these people I am very thankful to have ended up with my geek and not one of the others. 🙂

Meghan mentioned in a previous post that we were able to look up from our computers for about 30 minutes last week and take a walk along the beach. I just uploaded those recordings to a great video sharing site called blip.tv .

You can see the three videos here:
http://wolfes.blip.tv

(I also took some video when we went over the the Indian Ocean side, I’ll let you know when I am able to upload those)