August 12th - A Little Rest...

David (the "vacationer") took my 6:30 - 9:30am shift this morning at the clinic to give me a little relief going into next week's schedule. I am very thankful for that since my brain now only seems to be working when I'm at the clinic. When I head to the volunteer dorm, I seem to forget A LOT - although Bob would probably tell you all that "That's normal"!

Even though I didn't have to go in at 6:30am, I still did in order to be sure Andrés was there to relieve the volunteer who was watching Erika and also to give him his malaria pill (4 days late). He came a little late, but did manage to get there...so I went back to the volunteer dorm to lay down.

I didn't realize how sleep deprived I actually was until I woke at 10:30am still groggy and my body still extremely tired. Although I had a pretty good night's sleep, this was much needed due to the demanding hours of the clinic. At 10:30am I mustered what little energy I could to get up and prepare my mind & body to work at the clinic again from 12:30 - 7:00pm. Although that was a slow 2 hours of moving around, when I walked into the clinic, my adrenaline kicked in once again and all was fine.

The electricity went out again (which is actually a pretty common occurence), but that meant no fans in the clinic to move the air around. We were brought a DVD player last week, but two days have now went by where it hasn't been working...so we are left with coloring books, reading books (most are in English), a few chess games that have pieces missing (which I just showed them how to use them as checkers games), and a few stuffed animals. Six hours will go by pretty quickly if you keep the kids busy!