…you and your neighbors may be forced to live without electricity for months if the transformer that powers a community’s electricity mysteriously goes missing, and the electric company refuses to replace it without being paid a huge sum of money.

…you realize that the “menus” in local restaurants are pretty much useless, since they’re usually stocked out of all but a few items.

…you will be dragged to religious services and will be forced to improvise when it comes to an appropriate head covering (e.g., a Santa hat with blinking lights works wonders)

…you may accidentally use annointing oil to cook your eggs (since there’s no label denoting it as such, and it’s sold in the marketplace next to the tomatoes and bouillon cubes).

…you’ll contract malaria (and possibly typhoid) and decide it’s no big deal.

It’s been too long, I know.  And so much has transpired.  I’ll try to keep it short, but of course, I’ll fail spectacularly.

On child slavery

Let’s just say that diplomacy did not work.  In numerous conversations, I tried to urge my roommate to be kinder and more patient with this 11-year old girl Bidemi.  But the abuse escalated.  It was admittedly naïve of me to think I could change someone’s behavior with a few empathetic words.  I discovered this when my roommate got angry at me for giving this girl my food flask one morning.  Bidemi had not been fed breakfast in several days and was never given lunch, unlike my roommate’s two daughters.  Apparently she was being “punished” for some trivial infraction.  After this followed several temperamental meltdowns and disturbingly passive-aggressive behavior on my roommate’s part, and I found myself intervening constantly to protect Bidemi from the onslaught of daily beatings, unreasonable workload, and criticism.  As it turns out, the only thing that did work in curbing my roommate’s behavior was the fear of exposure.  I finally got into an argument with her where I told her outright that I was considering reporting her to my boss, and that her behavior constituted abuse.  I pleaded with her to send Bidemi home.  She started to be much nicer to Bidemi after that whenever I was around.  Unfortunately, some other events transpired (e.g., her using my fondness for Bidemi to obtain money from me under false pretenses, her spreading malicious gossip about me in the office, her failure to tell me that one of our office coworkers and her child was moving into our apartment until I woke up one day to the sound of them moving in).  I had had enough, and I finally told my boss everything.  He was shocked and ordered my roommate to send Bidemi back to her family.  A few weeks ago, to my great relief, she finally did.  She didn’t tell me in advance that she would do so (probably deliberately), and I never got a chance to say goodbye to Bidemi. Luckily, I had managed to sneak Bidemi my mobile phone number without my roommate’s knowledge.  I am so glad I did, because I got a call from Bidemi two weeks ago, happier than she’s ever been now that she’s back with her family.  I also managed to send her some gifts, for which her parents secretly came to thank me in person yesterday, telling me that Bidemi has told them the whole story of her ordeal and that she talks about me all the time fondly.

My boss is also looking for new accommodations for me, but as of now, I am still living with my roommate.  Our interactions are civil and polite but has none of the friendly rapport that it had at the beginning.  Despite everything, she has begged me to stay in the apartment (for self-interested reasons, I suspect, and not because she particularly wants me around).

There is a lot more to this saga, and a lot of details have been left out, especially with regard to money.  But I honestly have no energy to go into it all.  Suffice it to say I have a better understanding of “evil.”  Not to label my roommate as “evil,” as nothing is ever that black-and-white.  But I understand now that when most people do bad things, it arises from a loss of perspective and not a gleeful joy from doing bad things.  My roommate argued that she was not “abusive,” that it was kind of her to take in another family’s child and pay her school fees, that in Nigeria, children were commonly subjected to corporal punishment, and that Bidemi deserved to be beaten for not knowing how to do the simplest things, like covering the pot when warming soup or not hanging wet laundry properly.   She felt completely justified in her actions and was shocked when I (and other colleagues) admonished her for her cruelty.  I bet Hitler or Pol Pot or Stalin would react similarly.

This situation has made me realize that I’m a hell of a lot tougher and more capable at dealing with difficult situations than I give myself credit for.  It also pinpointed for me my fatal weakness: my being drawn to vulnerability and my willingness to fight for the underdog.  With regard to the situation with Bidemi, one coworker said to me, “Why can’t you just live your own life and ignore what’s going on in the rest of the house?”  My supervisor said in a similar vein, “Be careful not to get so attached.  You can’t save the world, no matter how hard you try.”  Still, I’m glad that there is a happy ending to this story.  Even if I accomplish nothing else while I’m here, I will always take comfort in having helped this girl get reunited with her family (which may have happened on its own eventually, but at least I speeded up the process).

On clinical distance

I have had thoughtful email conversations with Laura A about clinical distance, about the fear of losing our ability to empathize when we step back from a situation.  When I arrived, I had expected that my first significant international experience would be more observational in nature, a chance to learn about health and development but from an clinical distance that would preserve my objectivity.  I believed that my “foreign” status meant that I would always be an outsider and regarded with polite disinterest and disregard by the community.  Instead, I’ve become rather involved without quite intending to.  I’m the only foreigner around (though there are a couple of Americans who have recently visited for 1- or 2-week stretches), and I live and work with Nigerians.  As a result, I’ve gotten numerous comments on how well I’ve “integrated” into Nigerian society, that I’m so “free and comfortably myself.”  I do feel like I’ve been welcomed into this community with open arms, and my gregariousness and willingness to tease my coworkers seems to have endeared me to them.  And yet, that lack of clinical distance also means that I’ve become entangled in the messiness of human society.  It means that I’m forced to intervene in situations like Bidemi’s, have my home situation be the topic of office gossip once my boss is made aware, have my clothes criticized openly by strangers (“You should wear more colors”).  It means that people make inappropriate requests for money, take advantage of my ignorance, and plead their needs.  The importance of clinical distance becomes apparent to me after Bidemi’s situation is finally resolved, and I realize just how emotionally drained and exhausted I am.  I crave clinical distance right now.  I feel like I’m that “oyibo” (white person) who came to Nigeria to stir up trouble, no matter how much people reassure me that I did the right thing.  I have this desire to live by myself for a while and be left to my own devices to recover, with only a few friends around me.

Perhaps that’s why emergency medicine might be the right fit for me.  I can deal with crisis situations, but I need to protect myself from my own tendency to get too attached, which gyn-onc or peds critical care will not allow me to do.

Hi all,

Having been here for about three weeks, I’ve gotten accustomed to taking cold bucket baths in the dark, having a working refrigerator only about 5 hours of the day, seeing amorous goats frolicking and rooting through our trash can for food, and having giant mutant bugs all up in my business.  However, the lack of internet has been driving me batsh*t crazy.  Yup.  I can do without creature comforts, but a life without internet is a life not worth living.

This email dispatch may seem full of negativity.  I don’t mean for it to seem that way.  You see, these are actually the issues that have been weighing on my mind and soul most heavily, and so I need to get them off my chest before I can focus on the positive.  Let me just say that I’ve also experienced joy, friendship, amazing sights, delicious food, and a sense of community, and I plan to elaborate on the positives further in the months to come.  I would not trade my experience here for anything.

On Riots in Nigeria

On Tuesday, I was in a pickup truck with 4 of my coworkers, heading back to the office from a trip to the state capital.  We passed by the wreckage of a terrible accident on the expressway.  With horrified expressions, we speculated as to what could have happened.  Then we came across an empty bus that had been parked sideways on the highway as a roadblock.  Our truck and the other cars on the road were forced to take a detour into town.  As we approached an intersection, we saw maybe 30 young men, yelling and wielding large sticks, disrupting road traffic.

“What the hell is going on?” one of my coworkers wondered aloud.

Then the men spotted our vehicle and rushed over to us.  They started pounding on the windows and beating on the truck with their sticks.

“Give me your keys, and get out of the car.”  one of the men ordered.

My coworkers started protesting, “What is going on?  What do you think you’re doing?”

“Open up!”

The men then proceeded to open all the doors themselves and force my coworkers out of the truck, grabbing the keys from the driver.  Unfortunately, as the truck’s door locks were manual, my coworkers were not in the habit of locking their doors.  My door was the only one that happened to be locked (thanks to my overly neurotic, worst-case scenario tendencies, which came in handy that day).  I was sitting behind the driver’s seat in the back.  One of the men tried to reach around the driver side door to unlock my door as well.  I pried his hand from the lock and kept my hand tightly on it.  I refused to budge.  I just stared straight ahead, not moving a muscle, praying silently to some higher power, my heart pounding against my rib cage.  Luckily, the men didn’t persist in trying to remove me from the truck.  I sat, observing the action and hoping that all of those reassurances that I gave my parents about my safety would not be proven wrong.

“The state government, they killed 6 of our lecturers!”

“Our university has been closed for 3 months now.”

“Some of us were supposed to graduate, and now our education has been wasted.”

“We need to send a message to the government that we won’t take this anymore.”

My coworkers pleaded with them, trying to make them see reason.

“We don’t work for the state government.”

“Then why does your truck say UN Development Programme?”

“That’s the United Nations.  It’s an international aid program.  We don’t work for the government.  We work to help bring poor villages out of extreme poverty.  We are on your side.  We are with you.”

“You are not with us!”

And so it went.  I sat in the car and waited.  I did not join the coworkers in talking with the men outside.  As a “white woman” and a foreigner, I would only provoke their anger instead of assuaging it.  It seemed like hours, though it was probably no more than 15 minutes.  I observed the angry faces, the raised fists, the wooden sticks.  One of the men stood nearby, watching me.  I smiled at him, an involuntary reaction borne out of a desire to diffuse the tension somehow.  He smiled back.  I noticed someone else holding a box of matches, but I didn’t know why.  Was he planning to have a cigarette?

Finally, the matter seemed resolved.  The men let my coworkers back in the truck after being convinced of their good intentions.  One of the men jumped in to help navigate the truck to a road that would lead us back to the expressway.  As I looked back, I saw black plumes of smoke rising from a car tire they had set on fire.  We came across the rather inefficient police about 10 minutes away on another road, unaware of the situation.  My driver said, “There’s a mob of angry men in town that set up a roadblock to divert traffic, and they just molested us.  Please do something!”  He was met with vague assurances, and we drove on.

A few minutes later, one of my coworkers remarked, “I think they only wanted to be heard.  I don’t think they would have hurt us.”

Another replied, “I think it’s good that we got out of the car and tried to talk with them.  If we had tried to drive on, they would have reacted even worse.”

“Yes, but they probably would only have set the truck on fire.  Not harmed us. ”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

We drove on.  Dr. Gbenga said, “Rosalyn, I was so impressed by how calm you were.”

“Oh, believe me, my heart was all in V-tach.”

“It didn’t seem that way at all.  You were so calm.”

“Well, as I said before, every day here is an adventure.”  Everyone in the car burst out laughing.

Later, I found out that the crowd of angry men were university students whose university had been closed for 3 months, due to lack of payroll funds (unfortunately, an all-too-common phenomenon in Nigeria).  The professors had not gotten paid or were getting paid too little.  As the situation was becoming untenable, and students were clamoring for the school to reopen, the professors had set up a meeting last week with the state government to discuss pay, with the intent of reopening the school.  On their way back from the meeting, their van got into a horrific car accident (the one we had passed on the expressway), and 6 of the professors were killed.  The university students were livid, claiming that if the government had been paying the professors in the first place, this meeting would never have occurred, and this tragedy would never have happened.  Hence, it was the government’s fault.  Circuitous logic, yes, but grief makes us cast blame where it does not always belong.

On Indentured Servitude in Nigeria

I have become fond of an 11-year old girl, Bidemi, who lives in my apartment.  She is from a poor family of farmers in a village far away and is currently a domestic servant (slave?) to my flatmate Mary and her two young children.  Although she does attend school and is clothed and fed, she gets up at 5am to do almost all of the chores around the house (including fetching water from the well) and to watch over the kids when Mary is not home.  She spends almost all of her free time doing work.  She is beaten or flogged with a wire for minor infractions, such as a missing sock.  She is criticized and yelled at constantly.  She sleeps on the hard concrete floor without even a blanket or pillow, while Mary and her two young daughters sleep on a mattress.  Bidemi doesn’t receive any money for her services, and she is often denied things (such as detergent for washing her clothes), because “you are not my child.”  I had to give her some of my detergent when she ran out.  She is expected to fend for herself, an impossibility.  She has virtually no possessions of her own.  No books, no music, no toys, no crayons, nothing.  I feel terrible for her, and the neighbor upstairs even yelled at Mary for treating this girl so badly, saying that Bidemi is still a young girl, and that Mary needs to be watching out for her development.  It’s shocking to me, because Mary professes to be a very devout Christian, and she has been so kind to me.  But I’ve lost respect for her after seeing how she treats Bidemi, who is the shyest, sweetest, most polite girl I’ve ever met.

I’ve been treating Bidemi extra nicely, giving her biscuits and food whenever I can (for which she always thanks me with a smile and a curtsy).  She loves to read, and she has been reading Alice in Wonderland on my electronic e-reader.  She wants to be a lawyer and travel the world.  She thinks the soundtrack to the film “The Piano”, which I played for her on my laptop, is beautiful.  On a few occasions, I’ve let her sleep on my mattress, because I couldn’t bear the thought of her sleeping directly on the concrete floor in the next room.  We had been spending lots of time together, and she teaches me words in Yoruba and tells me that she misses her family.  I secretly gave her 50 Naira last week so she can buy breadballs at school (each breadball costs about 10 Naira, equivalent to 6 cents each).  Bidemi has taken a liking to me and offers to wash my dishes or clothes (as she does all the dishes and laundry for the rest of the household).  I’ve resisted her efforts and instead have offered countless times to help her with her chores, though she usually doesn’t let me.  Yesterday, I helped her fetch some water from the well.  Today, fed up with the extreme level of responsibility she’s forced to bear,  I just grabbed the dish sponge and started on the pots and plates, allowing her only to rinse them and put them away.

I worry about this girl, and I find myself in turmoil over what to do.  There are no child protective services here.  What do I do?  Do I let the neighbors upstairs know what’s going on?  I have a feeling they already do.  I feel like the kinder I am to Bidemi, the harsher Mary is to her.  Already, Bidemi is spending less time in my room, even though I’m always inviting her in to read my e-book or play on my laptop.  So many times I’ve wanted to say something to Mary.  But how can I make myself heard in a way that will actually change the situation for the better, without Bidemi being punished?  Yet I know that with my big mouth and impulsive nature, I will eventually say something.  I will try to say it with tact, but eventually my thoughts will reveal themselves, because the guilt of standing by and watching Bidemi treated this way is becoming unbearable.  I sleep badly some nights, thinking about this.  Mary is oblivious to my discomfort, and today when she notices that my shoes have tracked some dirt into my room, she immediately calls Bidemi to wring out my bedsheets and sweep my floor.  I protest, “No, please just let me do it myself.”  “Let Bidemi do it.”  So Mary and I watch while Bidemi labors, and I am left with a sinking feeling in my heart.*

On Transportation in Nigeria

There’s nothing quite like seeing Nigeria while riding on a back of a motorbike along dirt roads.  Also, you can avoid potholes more easily on a bike, unlike that poor 18-wheeler that hit a massive pothole on the expressway (likely while driving at night) and flipped over on its side, spilling its entire contents onto the road (mostly glass soda bottles).  I think the truck has yet to be cleared from the road.

On Corruption in Nigeria

Nigeria celebrated its Independence Day last Friday.  It was a special day, deemed the Golden Jubilee, because it was the 50^th anniversary of its independence from British colonization.  And yet, it turned out to be a day marked by tremendous cynicism and violence, in which a bombing in the capital city of Abuja killed 14 people.  Newspaper editorials decried the Golden Jubilee as a “celebration of failure”.  Everywhere I went, Nigerians railed against the amoral leadership, the politicians who embezzle as much as they can and send their kids to schools overseas, while roads remain unpaved and unrepaired, and electricity remains appallingly inconsistent.

In my office, we had a party that was prefaced with a discussion question:  “If you had the chance to move to the U.S., Germany, or South Africa instead of being a Nigerian citizen, would you?”  My coworkers said they would choose to be Nigerian, and they gave eloquent speeches about the tremendous potential of a country with so much in terms of natural resources and human talent.  They held up countries like Ghana and Cameroon as examples.  If those countries could get their sh*t together, why couldn’t Nigeria elect some strong, effective leaders with moral scruples and a grand vision of what Nigeria could be?  In private, however, several of my coworkers talked about their dreams of leaving Nigeria and moving overseas to the U.S., which they referred to as “God’s own country”, or to Germany.  They were just too fed up with the high unemployment, the crime, the political corruption, the broken infrastructure, the expensive food prices, the universities that shut down abruptly because the professors weren’t getting paid by the government, the doctors who went on strike because of appalling hospital conditions in rural areas of the country, and so many other misfortunes.

Thank you for reading this, if you have.  Writing this feels like a form of therapy.  I’m sure this email dispatch has left you all in high spirits (pardon the sarcasm), and I’m sorry about that.  In my next email dispatch, I will talk about the amazing work at the MV site in Ikaram, where communities are visibly being lifted out of extreme poverty.  I have to say that even though I had been skeptical before as to how much could actually be accomplished for only $110 per villager per year, the MVP team here has done some extraordinary work in the face of very tough obstacles, and in only four years.  In fact, the government is already working on scaling up the Millennium Villages Project to include hundreds of sites throughout Nigeria.  It doesn’t  mean that there isn’t a long, long way to go, based on my work in quality improvement in the health system here.  But the efforts being made are simply superhuman.  I accord my fiercely talented and hardworking Nigerian colleagues mad props for that.

Hi family and friends!

Now that I’ve settled in, I wanted to share a few of my thoughts upon arriving:

On Driving…in Nigeria

Driving on Nigerian highways is, to say the least, unpredictable.  Large crowds of people populate the sides of roads, waiting for rides from green taxis, buses, or motorbikes.  People weave through cars on highways, selling newspapers, gum, snacks, even clocks.  Schoolchildren cross the highway, holding hands.  Cars routinely get off a traffic-jammed highway and drive along the dirt roads adjacent to it, forming an extra lane or two and sometimes accidentally falling into a ditch.  Large stretches of highway have no lane markings at all.  The highways are narrow, maybe two lanes in each direction, max.

Once you leave the vicinity of the big city, there is usually only one lane in each direction without a barrier or divider.  Kind of like a two-way street, except in highway form.  The only (rather horrifying difference) is that the lanes in both directions are passing lanes, so that if you want to pass the very slow car in front of you, you must drive into the adjacent lane towards oncoming traffic, and make sure you successfully get back into your own lane before the oncoming cars crash into you.  Yes, I know that there are highways in America where this is done.  It doesn’t make it any less terrifying, especially on a busy highway.  It’s like one big game of chicken, played over and over again.

Local roads are made up of dirt, and they get muddy and waterlogged in the rainy season.  An 18-wheeler got stuck on one of these roads, prompting people to dig the mud out from under the wheels with large plastic bowls.  What a painstaking process.  This also happened to the MVP SUV I was arriving in, but luckily we were able to free ourselves in about 10 minutes.

On Living in Nigeria

As soon as I got through customs at Abuja airport, the electricity turned off.  Little did I realize that this was actually quite common, and that the national electrical grid is off more than it is on.  I have electricity maybe 6-8 hours a day (and a couple of these hours are in the middle of the night, which is pointless).  The families that can afford to do so will buy generators, but many can’t.  Even owning a refrigerator is inconvenient, as the refrigerator can’t run on the generator and must be unplugged whenever it is running.  The iron also can’t be used on the generator, so I jump at the chance to iron my clothes whenever electricity is available.

I’m living in an apartment very close to the MVP office in Ikare.  It’s shared with my office mate Mary, and her three children.  My conditions here are rustic.  Goats and chickens roam the dirt roads with their little ones in tow.  No running water.  There is an indoor toilet, but it doesn’t flush, so I have to add water to the toilet bowl manually.  No internet or TV.  Fire ant infestation.  I hope to get a small plastic desk and chair to do work on.  My mattress and pillow are made of an impossibly hard and unyielding foam that’s hurting my back.  I couldn’t help myself; I indulged in a small generator (to provide backup electricity), a blanket (to soften the hard mattress surface), and a minifridge.  None of these were too expensive by U.S. standards (the minifridge was the most expensive and cost about $180), but I feel guilty that I can afford these things when my roommate couldn’t.  So the minifridge and the small generator are shared between us.  I have to confess, I may also indulge in a USB modem to connect onto wireless internet when I’m not at the office.  Though people here are generally disinterested in having 24/7 internet, I find that it’s tough not having internet in the evenings or weekends, being the information hog that I am.  Plus, not having internet makes it difficult to do work on the weekends (god, I’m such a bundle of fun!).

My roommate Mary is sweet and accommodating.  I’m touched by the fact that she has clearly bent over backwards to make me feel comfortable.  She painted the walls of my room a lovely lime green, she fed me some of her delicious Nigerian food, and she refuses to let me do any of the household chores, including my own dishes.  It’s as though I’m a permanent hotel guest.  In fact, she almost seems to find it offensive when I try to insist on doing my own dishes, as though I don’t trust her with the task.  So I yield.  But I secretly try to do my own dishes or sweep the kitchen when no one is around.

On Being a Westerner in Nigeria

Ikare is a teeming town, with a large marketplace that sells just about everything, including high-end electronics.  Yet I’m the only foreigner for many miles around.  Whenever I go to the marketplace, accompanied by my Nigerian colleagues, I’m greeted with shouts of “white man” and “hello.”  It’s their way of being friendly, but I’m now starting to understand what it feels like to be a celebrity, always being noticed and being expected to respond in kind.  A few people will actually touch my arm to see how my skin feels.  Children gape open-mouthed and approach me shyly.  One talkative and ebullient college girl came up to me and asked me for my phone number.  When I told her that I don’t have a working cell phone number yet, she gave me her number and insisted I call her.   “We will be best friends!  I love you.  You will call me, right?”  I feel like that person who’s just had a one-night stand with someone who’s already making marriage plans.  Lady, you came on way too strong; tone it down a notch.

At the same time, the people at the market try to overcharge me for their items.  None of the prices are marked; every single item can be (and usually is) bargained down.  But with me, they start at a much higher price, trying to take advantage of my ignorance of current market standards and my perceived wealth.  Luckily, my colleagues accompany me to the market, which means they bargain it down for me to a more reasonable level.

Money is one of those subjects that I have trouble wrapping my head around since my arrival.  Though I’ve always been grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, I’ve never thought of myself as coming from a wealthy or privileged background.  Now I’m in a place where I’m one of the wealthiest people around.  Some people interact with me strangely because of this.  A work colleague brought a friend visiting from another town to meet me.  He was talking at great length about how poor he was, and how he couldn’t afford to pay his school fees (there are no student loans or grants here), so he never graduated from polytechnical school, where he had been studying science.  He wanted to work as a lab tech but couldn’t find a job and is currently unemployed.  He joked that I should take him to America with me so he could marry a rich white woman.  When I was showing him some pictures I had taken on my digital camera, he  said, “Maybe you can give this to me?”  “No, I can’t give you my digital camera.”  “When you leave?”  “I’m sorry, but I like my camera.” “You can always buy another one.”  Which, granted, is true, but the expectation that I would just give a total stranger my digital camera because I can buy another one was rankling, as was his rather simplistic notion that America was teeming with rich white women willing to marry him for love and support him financially.  At the same time, I could sense his desperation and frustration at being poor in a place where opportunities are so limited, despite all the intellectual and social potential.  I would be frustrated, too.

Being here has made me prone to giving things away, but only in spontaneity, and not when it is expected or demanded of me.  The truth is, living with my roommate and her three girls means that I see on a day-to-day basis how hard it is to make ends meet as a single mother and how little most people have here.  I had told my roommate that I would leave the refrigerator and generator for her, not only as a way of thanking her for her generosity and kindness, but also because I can’t take either of those things on a plane with me, and it would be too much of a hassle to resell them anyway.  I also gave her kids some colored pens and crackers, which has endeared me to them.  They love coming into my room and leaping on my mattress and playing with my hair, which they said was like “ribbon” (their term for hair extensions).  I’m downloading “The Princess and the Frog” for them on iTunes.  The oldest, a bright and industrious 11-year old, wants to go to university and be a lawyer “if someone can help me.”  By “help”, I think she’s referring to financial support for school fees, as she can’t afford it on her own.

I’ve developed a stomachache that seem to be worsened by the Malarone (my anti-malarial meds), so I stopped taking the Malarone for the past day or two until my stomach settles down.  Today I’m feeling much better, despite some occasional twinges of pain.  Applying 25% DDT bug spray and keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t get bitten by an infected mosquito.

The people here are so kind and friendly.  Already I feel included in the community, what with my colleagues offering to take me to their church, visiting me at my place, and offering to take me out on the weekends to indulge in “palm wine” or take day trips to nearby cities.  My travel guitar seems to be a huge hit, as quite a few people have gotten excited and asked me questions like, “Can you teach me to play R. Kelly’s ‘I Believe I Can Fly?’ ”  I look forward to getting to know my colleagues better.

No more promises of updating this blog on any sort of regular basis, because whenever I make such a promise, my subconscious subverts me at every turn.  But let’s also blame it on the teeth-grindingly slow and inconsistent internet that a small town/rural village in Africa has to offer.  Often, it takes entire minutes to load a single webpage, and when it finally loads, numerous graphics are marked by empty boxes with x’s in them.  It’s enough to incite a violent desire to throw my laptop at the nearest chicken.

Finding myself deprived of the traditional forms of amusement available in the developed world (e.g., television, internet, blockbuster movies), I spend my evenings watching the goats in my backyard, chuckling out loud as they scratch their bellies against the concrete gutter.  Who knew goats had such comic timing?

But I jest.  The truth is, this has been an extraordinary, life-changing experience for me.  I know, I know, it’s such a cliche.  Naive girl from developed country spends a period of time in a developing country and comes back with her eyes opened to worldwide suffering and poverty and all that jazz.  But my experience is distinctly unusual, for a few reasons.  Over the past few months, I sent out several email dispatches to family and friends chronicling my adventures.  I’ll post them here over the next week for posterity.

I’ve had to completely overhaul my wardrobe, as I’ve discovered that in Nigeria, women are expected to dress very modestly.  No low necklines, no sleeveless blouses, and even trousers are not widely accepted.  Women are expected to wear skirts, but they have to be below the knee.  Since I’ll be in a rural village area that consists of Christians and Muslims alike, my standards of dress will have to be much more conservative than if I was in a big city like Lagos.  Plus, the temperature averages about 80F, which means light cotton or linen is preferable to denim or polyester.  So I’m leaving behind most of my clothes and bringing stuff I bought from Old Navy.

I bought maybe 5 or 6 of these shirts in different colors.  The material is so light and comfortable; I love it.

These blouson shirts are also awesome, but given the low neckline, I’ll probably have to wear a cami underneath.

I also ended up ordering some beautiful long skirts from Overstock.com.  Who would have guessed that a company devoted to buying inventory that businesses couldn’t sell would end up having such gorgeous items?  Which is why T.J. Maxx and Filene’s Basement have been so successful, I suppose.  One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

That’s the nice thing about being forced to buy a whole new wardrobe.  It gives you a chance to clean out your closet and change your overall look drastically.  No more preppy Ann Taylor Loft and Banana Republic.  My friends used to mock me for my monochromatic color schemes, my “minimalist” style (which I took to mean “boring”), and my fondness for beige.  I have never been a person on the cutting edge of style.  Nor did I ever use clothes to “express myself,” as words sufficed for me, thank you very much.  If something fit me okay and wasn’t too crazy-looking, I bought it.  But now, thanks to my upcoming trip, I’ve transformed into a person who wears loose, flowing clothes.  Like an ultra-granola hippie. Co-op and organic farming, here I come.

So much more to write about my trip, but I’ve got to save some material for later posts.  Yes, I will be writing in this blog more consistently, if only so I can look back and remember something of my experiences abroad.  Like an amnestic patient, my episodic memory has really gone down the tubes since medical school started.  This blog will be my version of Memento, a way of trying to record what happened for future posterity.

I’m thinking of buying a small travel guitar, an e-reader, and some Step 2 study material, really anything to keep boredom at bay.  Years of living in NYC has gotten me accustomed to instant gratification, constant entertainment, and speed and efficiency.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to get away from the noise, the crowds, and the pressured lifestyle, to live life a little more slowly and deliberately.  But the culture shock will be enormous, and I have a feeling I’ll be missing NYC terribly.

The other school told me I was near the top of their waitlist (they stratified their waitlist, and I was in the top bunch).  I contacted the school beforehand to inquire about the likelihood of getting off the waitlist (I was leaving the country for a bit and needed to make some important decisions).  The dean of the school actually called me to find out how interested I was in attending their school, because what she was looking for was a firm commitment to attend the school if I got in (e.g., “letter of intent”) and even offered to have the finaid office run the numbers and come up with a preliminary finaid package, because I told her that finances was the primary reason I couldn’t write a “letter of intent” just yet.  So a firm commitment to attend the school if accepted can play a huge role in the waitlist struggle.  The other two schools in which I didn’t get off the waitlist were schools I didn’t care about and never bothered to contact.

I don’t know how much this info helps the anxious pre-meds awaiting their acceptances from the waitlist.  But I will say that I feel for all of you.  I know how much the med school application process can suck, and it only gets worse with residency and fellowship.  All I can say is that I believe the struggle is worth it in the end.  Hopefully, I’ll continue to believe that.