Where one thing ends, another begins

I remember senior year in high school, sitting in the parking lot, probably about to grab some McDonalds before french class with Madame Touzeau. This was during that time of my life where med school was still being considered, where Doctors Without Borders was something I was still working towards, when I believed that absolute truth existed, and when I still ate at McDonalds. On that day, a friend said to me that he would rather much be a mechanic than a doctor. Unlike dotors, he said, mechanics actually knew what was wrong with their patient. Mechanics who've built their cars from scratch know the bodies of their car inside and out; doctors on the other hand, have been trying all throughout history to map out the human body only to be able to give an educated guess to the functioning or "malfunctioning" of the human body.

His words perfectly capture my adventure to the hospital on Friday. I paid 28,000 fCFA to hear a doctor tell me that my blood test came out negative for Malaria. Instead, he said, I had some sort of infection.. what it was, he did not know; he said maybe bronchitis. Then, I paid another 10,000 fCFA or so to get antibiotics and such to cure this ambiguous infection. Including cab fee, the aforementioned charges, and doctor's fee and whatever else Ive forgotten to mention, I basically paid 65,900 fCFAs total to find out that I did not have malaria.

On a completely different note, I am now no longer living in Dakar. Im in Sebi right now, at yet another internet cafe. The house that im staying at has a garden of banana, mango, lime, and guava trees. The family Im living with is astronomically larger than mine in Dakar, but equally as friendly, if not more talkative. I wont say how many family members there are because that's breaking a senegalese superstition, and even if i did try to count, I would not have a number to tell you because there are so many people that walk in and out that I dont know whos a neighbor and whos a hostsibling. Lets just say that I dont have a double digit number of siblings, but its up there.

I was the first to get dropped off of all the students, and probably the first to start work as well. No one was supposed to start at their perspective internships until tomorrow, but the minute I dropped my bag off at home, I was out the door again to the clinic to start my first day of work because thats what my supervisor requested last minute-- literally, when I got there this morning. There, I probably spoke more Wolof than Ive ever spoken in all my time at Dakar. The doctor, my supervisor, had me sit in on all his consultations and get each patients prelim info using Wolof.

I was also told that I would need to learn another language, the local dialect here is apparent neither French nor Wolof but Sereer, and more specifically the dialect of Saffe. I havent even gotten really all that far past salutations, numbers, and body parts in Wolof... I dont know how ready I am to pick up something new... but hey, im open to anything.

After lunch, we sat underneath the lime trees in the backyard. There are six lime trees. They provided a beautiful canopy of shade for what is probably going to be the beginning of another exciting adventure in Senegal.