My 30th!!

Me, my medical student, and 2 of the nurses in clinic.

I can't believe this is my 30th blog entry!  Time is really flying!  Clinic today wasn't nearly as bad as Tuesday was-partly because I had the medical student seeing patients as well.  He would see and examine people, then present them to me and I'd take a second to teach him something before we move on to the next patient.  Worked out to be pretty efficient-he did a good job.  He seems to have picked up quite an interest in orthopaedics and was asking me about the process of becoming an orthopaedic surgeon.  He was thinking twice about it when I went through everything, but I was pretty encouraging to him.

I left clinic at a decent time this afternoon and was able to grab a quick nap-still a bit tired from staying up late last night.  I went to get another haircut today and the barber was just talking it up.  He was telling me about the difficulties trying to run a decent business in the area and maintaining good electricity, then he jumped to talking about maintaining a good marriage, and next onto how he didn't have many friends outside of his customers.  He was kinda all over the place-maybe he was stressed and just wanted to talk or something-but I just listened to him, smiled, and was like "yeah, uh huh, I feel you.."  He's a nice guy.  On my way to the barbershop I stopped to read the local news.  Many people don't have a television here and can't watch any news, so there's this big bulletin board where someone actually writes down all of the news in chalk!  Everyone gathers around it daily to see what's the "gees." (Liberian slang for news!).  It's actually pretty cool to see everyone around it reading!

Checking out the gees!

I got a call from my friend to go hang out again tonight since I'm leaving soon.  The plan was for a group of us to go to this club, but only one person ended up coming!  And when we got to the spot, there was hardly anybody there.  We were going to scratch the whole thing and just plan something else, but since we were already out we decided to stay for a bit and enjoy the music.  I was scrambling for dinner before we went out because I didn't get around to eating until late this evening.  The only place where I could find food was this casino at Mamba Point Hotel.  I ran in and got a ham and cheese sandwich with some chips to hold me over!  Wasn't bad either, plus I got to checkout another casino.  It's interesting to see so many people gambling away so much money and then go right across the street and see extreme poverty-has been a recurrent theme here at times..

Anyway, I didn't stay out too late this evening because I still need to catch up on sleep and hope to have a full weekend so I can't burn the midnight african oil too much just yet...

Hope everyone had a good day.

"If we do not plant knowledge when young, it will give us no shade when we are old."
Lord Chesterfield