Creek Boating and Mefloquine Dreams

It was another jungle walk weekend. Sarah Speer, Suzie, Midhuna, Monique and I went to a village called Mowito (which sounds a lot like mojito and was certainly as refreshing) which was about 7km outside of Impfondo. It was a quaint little village, very neat looking, and had a satellite village of Akas. The outing was intended to be going out on a river boat, but when we got there, we noticed it wasn’t much of a river at this point, but a creek, due to low water levels. So we just went out on the pirogues for a small stretch of creek and even tried out hands at rowing the boat. I’m pretty sure we didn’t really do much rowing and the Aka that was in the back really did all of the rowing/steering work. It was fun regardless and the shade was absolutely refreshing. The water was a unique tea color, which cast a red hue to the logs and sunken pirogues just under the water’s surface. The jungle was reminiscent of a scene from Jurassic Park, rich greenery and abundant in jungle vegetation, we missed out on the dinosaurs though. We got the special treat of going into the “wilderness,” to which my response was “aren’t we already in the wilderness?” But apparently we weren’t and we ventured to a clearing of tall grass. It was the kind that when you walked into it you all but disappeared from view, and to really disappear, all you had to do was squat down and the thick of the grasses would hide you. We had our lunch out in the clearing, then ventured back to the village. Along the way we encountered army ants. They are the kinds that march in groups and will demolish anything in their path. These are the ants that have such strong pinchers that they use them as stitches by letting them bite the skin together then popping off their heads…creepy no? We could jump over the lines of ants, but at some points they were marching straight along our path and we had to bound through them; Suzy and Midhuna didn’t escape without some bites.

On another more odd note, my mefloquine (malaria prophylaxis) dreams may have started to set it…The other night I woke up board straight and breathing really shallow. Sarah was awake too and our conversation went like this:
Sarah: Are you awake?
Me: Yeah, but there are giant caterpillars right next to me
Sarah: No, there aren’t
Me: Really?
Sarah:…Yeah, Are you really awake?
So it’s been caterpillar season and we have seen tons, and apparently I dreamed about them and was talking in my sleep, which woke Sarah up. I was awake, but I guess also still in my dream sequence when she was asking questions. But I finally completely woke from my reverie and we just started dying out laughing and went back to sleep.

Good news for the hospital: Dr. Fuka, the surgeon, is back…poor thing is going to have one huge workload waiting for him. The financial administrator is back from the DRC, and we had a few boxes of medical supplies come in with them on the planes. I didn’t realize how heavily we relied on those planes coming. By the end of the week we are always short on something, and are trying to work out a system so it doesn’t happen so often. But when the orders come in sometimes it’s what they ordered, others it’s not. Luckily MSF (medcine sans frontiers/ doctors without borders) is here too, so they lend us supplies from time to time. Many of the times is it certainly by the grace of God that we get our supplies or what we have lasts us until the next plane arrives.