This week was a regular work week for me, but a couple days were shaved off it while I was in transit back to Nimba. It has been nice to get back to the normal schedule of Nimba life. None of the normal annoyances really bugged me because I was happy to be back “home”. I started looking forward to the second half of my time here and realized that because I took my break a little late, the second half is actually only 7 weeks or so. And it was a strange feeling indeed to imagine that that won’t be enough time to get everything done. When I got here, the 6 months seemed like an eternity, but once I figured out how to keep the trains running on time I realized how little time there is for new work. And how few months to get it done in. ...

I am back in Nimba now, back with my adopted family here. The work is hard (even just one day has already presented a terrifying array of problems), but I am really happy to be back with the team and in my “own” bed. I brought back a new expat from Monrovia with me. Pierre is a Frenchman, an architect who worked in San Francisco for several years, and returned to France, then quit his job to work on real problems, instead of the somewhat unreal ones that architecture offered. He said that it annoyed him that people designed buildings that they do not know how to make. I don’t know yet if he knows how to make buildings, but I really like him and I think he will do well. His job is to build the replacement building for the pole and plastic sheeting hospital that I am supposed to keep limping along. ...

I am back at Accra, at the same place I stayed in the first night. Not very adventurous, but it has Internet and hot water, and is in a nice neighborhood. Here is a quick list of things I did while I was here: bought some craft items, saw the fort at Cape Coast, walked on the catwalk at Kakama National Park, swam (pool and ocean), got a mild sunburn from being too relaxed to even notice, had a massage, listened to drums over a bonfire. I am leaving out the less-than-glamorous things that always happen in a week of traveling. It was a nice week, and I’m rested enough to go back to Nimba. ...

So I’ve made it to (and past) the halfway point. I am on my vacation in Ghana and I thought I would give you all an update of what it islike to go from a post-conflict context to one of the richest countries in West Africa in 24 hours. In a few words, culture shock! The culture shock started as we drove out of Nimba. I had been out as far as Phebe Hospital, where the two cars meet when we do a “kiss movement” which is where one car leaves from Monrovia and one from Nimba at the same time, then they both meet in the middle. I rode out to Phebe hospital with our normal driver, Elijah, and read my Lonely Planet for West Africa on the way. I played with a kid in the car (a patient with a broken leg, who I coincidently mett while riding in the car weeks ago), giving him my little Altoids container with a rock inside it to rattle, and also making a paper airplane for him. Then we tranferred into the car from Monrovia, and that’s when the culture shock started to set in. ...

Just a quick note to tell you all that I am still alive. Things have not been super busy, but I haven’t felt too much like writing. This week a logistics helper came from Monrovia and completed a renovation of the building that used to be our food store into a new office building. After we finish moving out of the office this week, we will have more bedrooms for both the new expat arriving soon, and for guests. Right now, there are no rooms in the inn. I kept the rehabilitation plans really simple in order to get them done fast. I had planned to leave the wood trim unpainted and only whitewash the walls. But it turned out that we had some white paint left over from the health post renovation at Lepula. So I gave the team that paint to use. Then they complained that you can’t paint the walls white and the trim white. Fashion nazis! So we dug around some more and found some Jade Green paint that was also incorrectly bought for Lepula. Ministry of Health standard for health posts in Liberia is whitewashed walls with Forest Green trim, so the Jade Green was right out. I gave them that to mix with the white. The result is a shade of green that reminds me of the United States Forest Service every time I see it. Everyone really likes the new office because of the green windows and doors. They are pretty snazzy, actually. ...

Twice now, we’ve gotten huge numbers of injured people from vehicle accidents. Things are difficult in a hospital made of poles and plastic sheeting in the best of times, but with an influx of 15 to 20 injured people at night, it can get ugly fast. Luckily Emir (our doctor) is really good at handling situations like that. The team works together really well, and we all know our specialties well and how to anticipate problems, so it’s exciting, but not utter pandemonium, ...

Today we had a little excitement in the compound. The storekeeper came to me really agitated. He said that he’d gone in the food store to check that things were ready to deliver food on Monday. But when he opened the door he found a big snake. He showed me that it was as big as his forearm. Now, we have snake scares from time to time. It results in a frenzy of activity, as all the expats run for digital cameras, and the Liberians who grew up in the bush get their slingshots, cutlasses and sharp sticks ready, and all the city boys from Monrovia scream like girls. I tend to try to steer clear of the circus and watch the country boys to make sure that the snake is dispatched swiftly and safely. ...

The TFC is the Therapeutic Feeding Center, where severely malnourished patients can be fattened up. This is significantly harder than it sounds since it turns out that human bodies do not take well to severe starvation. As you put in fluids and carbohydrates, the body needs to adjust and deal with the new chemical balances. You can kill a person by feeding them. So the medicine in the TFC is actually a specialty, like urology or proctology, but less icky. Unfortunately for all the malnourished people in Africa, it is also a rare specialty, so we here in Saclepea are just sort of doing our best to run the TFC according to the books the experts in Europe wrote and sent to us. There’s a certain amount of “if it works, don’t change it”, which is OK, but can be dangerous if things aren’t actually working, but you don’t understand what’s happening enough to be able to tell. ...

Hello from the middle of a huge rainstorm. It has been threatening to rain all day, and getting muggier and muggier, so it is nice that the rain and the cool breezes have finally come. It means, of course, that when I am done writing this and try to send it, it will fail because the satellite signal is blocked, but this is a small inconvenience to trade for the cool breeze coming through the office. ...

I have been quite busy here recently and my energy level is flagging because a Sunday that was supposed to be restful ended having several fire drills in it, so the whole team pretty much missed a day of rest. We have 4 guests here right now from Swiss Development Corporation, so they take a bit of attention. But luckily, tomorrow is Flag Day, a Liberian holiday, so we get an extra day off. ...