one of those, i just want to speak english days

Today at the health clinic, it felt like everyone collectively decided that it would be shat on dorothy day. (Minus the actual shatting, though, with my luck... that is always a possibility.) It all started when one of the guys i work with decided that i should be the one to administer all iv drips, give all shots, and disinfect all wounds. after just one demonstration, he handed me the next patient to walk through the door and told me to basically stick a needle in her, a girl no older than maybe eight years old. He was in no which way joking: i stood there saying "deet deet"- no in wolof- over and over and over again, telling him that i was too inexperienced. He told me that i was here to experience new things and that this was the opportunity. We went through this exchange- with the girl watching us- for about a good six or so whole minutes until he finally realized that this girls high fever was by no means going to be reduced by my efforts.

Throughout the day i witnessed quite a few interesting ailments, but ill just fill you in on the two that stick out most in my mind. One guy came in with a bandage already on his foot. He needed his wound to be disinfected again, a wound which after the bandage was taken off, i found to be probably five inches long and half a centimeter wide. Apparently, his foot met the motor of a fishing boat. The second most interesting wound that i saw belonged to a girl of probably ten or so years. She had a hole on the bottom of her foot maybe the size of a dime- but with how swolen the wound was due to obvious infection, it looked like a gulfball-sized tumor. to disinfect her wound, the nurse- thankfully not me this time- took alcohol covered gauze and stuck it into the wound until you could only see an inch of gauze sticking out. Then, he pulled it all out and repeated the same procedure with a new peice of gauze. She was a trooper, she only cried- I wanted to scream the entire time.

Each week I am apparently supposed to shadow someone different- last week, it was the infirmier who did consultations- basically, the guy who played doctor. This week, im supposed to shadow the pharmicist. For whatever reason, I started off today disinfecting and refusing to setup IV drips. With maybe an hour and a half left in the day, they moved me to my actual post for the week- the closet sized pharmacy. There, all hell (in dorothy's mind) broke loose. I was given so much crap for not being able to converse in Wolof and Sereer. I kept on getting made fun of: for every word I actually was able to say in either language, they repeated back, mocking my pronunciation. When I would ask them what something meant in French, they would respond back to me in Wolof, or worse yet, Sereer. Mind you, they all speak some English and French fluently... so basically, they were giving me a hard time just to be assholes.

When it was time for me to leave, the same guy who decided it was my experiential day, stood in front of the door, refusing to let me leave. At this point, after all teh teasing and shit I put up with, all I wanted to do was cry. He and the pharmicist kept saying phrases really rapidly in Wolof, phrases I clearly didnt understand. Finally, just before I was ready to kill them, they let me walk out the door and go home.