Pizzaiolo

I know that many regular readers will have gone without sleep these past nights wondering whether French conversation class or shopping and pizza won out for my Wednesday night plans. Well, tossed on the horns of a cruel dilemma, I did what any right thinking chap would do in similar circumstance. I rationalized until I arrived at the answer I wanted. In the end I reasoned that, whereas there was no reason not to consider ordering a pizza in French a type of "conversation", it was unlikely in the extreme that our French class would feature any pizza at all. The preponderance of benefit therefore was going out to eat and shop. Quod erat demonstrandum. Ah, the lifelong benefits of higher education!

Anyway, about 6 pm I joined about 40 other folks from base at the air terminal. We received a briefing during which we were urged to stay together, remember our status as representatives of the US of A, as well various other cautions, admonitions and exhortations aimed at avoiding a clash of cultures. Suitably prepared, off we went.

There is something very relaxing to me about travel as a bus passenger, head resting on the window glass, watching the world slide by. Every traffic stop is a little vignette, a little silent movie starring the passers-by. The eye takes in the costumes, the action, the background, the mise en scene, and almost as soon as our busy hominid brain assigns some meaning to the protagonist's actions, the whole affair slides away to be replaced by another. It is a curiously pleasant type of passivity and especially so in a new country where the actors, costumes and settings are new and fascinating. Of course, this was an air-conditioned chartered bus, and thus I wasn't crowded and sweaty, and I didn't have to sit next to anyone with a live chicken...

We made our way up the peninsula, angling to the northwest off of Blvd. General de Gaul just past the French hospital, heading into what is denoted on the tourist maps as the "European Quarter". As sunset this near to the equator is always pretty close to 1800ish (it varies from about 1750 to 1830), dusk was falling as we touched down at our first stop - the basket market. This actually sounds a bit grander then the actual site - a short parking lot alongside an office building with cars parked on one side and the sellers sitting on the ground on straw mats opposite. All the vendors - there were about 10 - were women. Some of them were engaged in weaving while displaying their wares, and others smiled or called out to the 40 or so Americans now milling about the little space. Most of the actual selling though was done by men - youngish Djiboutians of about 25 years I would guess, whose relationship to the artisans was hard to guess at. They tended to speak a bit more english in any event. Were they brokers? Relatives? Anyway, the weaving was quite extraordinary, and I bought some baskets of various sizes and patterns to send home. I spent about 10,000 Djiboutian francs, which I'm sure was an awful overpayment, but I have nothing of the haggler in me. I left happy anyway. The women, all wearing colorful shash headscarves and brightly printed garabasaar shawls over their traditional dirac dresses, alas all declined to be photographed, a wish I respected. I had to smile at their girlish giggling when the question was put to them, though.

20 minutes or so and back on the bus, and off through the rapidly darkening streets to Pizzaiolo. This is a pizza place (no, really) about half a block off Place Menelik, the heart of the quartier Europeen. It sits in a non-descript block of businesses, shops and offices and is a popular place with the French, American and other ex-pats. Pizza was really quite good - a wood fired thin crust very much in the southern Italian or Provencal fashion. My "Sicilian" featured oil-cured olives, capers and anchovies, and would have been at home in Palermo or Catania. It cried out for a nice Cotes-Rotie or a cold beer, but as we were not off base on that type of a liberty chit, a Perrier had to suffice. Sigh.

Dinner finished we trooped back up from the cozy cellar dining rooms of Pizzaiolo, into the full dark night and back to the bus. Now we headed south to the approximate area of Place Rimbaud - the beginning of the quartier Africain. Here one is on the border of the "blue door" district, at the end of the sealed road and in what the Lonely Planet calls "the real soul of the city". It is a bustling, crowded, cacophonous and chaotic place, so I don't know what this implies for souls in general. What of you gentle reader? Is your soul a hurly burly market place or a quiet sunny piazza? I'm afraid mine may be a strip mall somewhere in Ohio, but that's a different matter...

Anyway, if you've ever been to a 3rd world outdoor market you'll have a good idea of the atmosphere. The one street we were allowed to explore was lined on both sides with shops and booths selling a colorful array of clothes, electronics, African jewelry, art, carvings, masks, spears, knives and doubtless a thousand other things. As you can imagine, a busload of Americans being conspicuously dropped off in the middle of this teeming third-world center of enterprise has an effect somewhat like throwing a fresh side of beef into a tank full of hungry sharks. In seconds we were surrounded by dozens of men who ardently claimed to be our friends and to have nothing but our best interests at heart as they urged us in one direction or another, assuring us that everything at their kiosk was practically being given away. It was fun for a while to saunter along, peeking at this and that and surrounded the whole time by a small crowd of hopeful entrepreneurs. I bought a child's T-shirt for Jack. I would have loved to get him one of the Afar or Issa style tribal knives, as these are among the very few actually Djiboutian artifacts available. The carvings of camels, giraffes and elephants as well as the masks and jewelry are from Kenya mostly, and the clothing from China. Alas tribal knives are not permitted to be bought or to sent through the mails (and it may be that they aren't the best gift for your 8 year old anyway). A T-shirt it will be.

After about 50 minutes of wandering about, we were shepherded back on the bus. The fuss had died down as the shoppers became less and less interested in the wares on display, but it was still with a good deal of relief I plopped back into the relative calm (and cool) of the bus. An old friend of mine once used the term "Mall Head" to describe the sensation of saturation with noise, bright lights and bustle that the mall shopper begins to suffer from after too long an immersion at the local Galleria. I had Djiboutian mall head. Mall a la tete?

Anyway home we went, bellies full of pizza and arms full of purchases. It was nice to have a chaperone for the trip, but I think I feel comfortable enough now with the streets and the city that I'll venture out in a smaller group next time. Does anybody out there need a wooden camel? I can get it for you practically free!

Talk to you next time.

Earth, Wind and Fire

I guess I should be careful what I wish for. I was thinking to myself that I really didn't have anything newsworthy to put in a blog entry, and was wondering if this would be a good chance to embark on my long delayed career as a free verse poet when...

Well, first thing I noticed this morning as I stepped out of the CLU was the wind. This wasn't very perceptive of me, as it blew the door shut while I was blinking furiously trying to get the gritty sensation of Djiboutian dust off of my eyeballs. Gusts into what I would guess were the 20 knot range swirled around me, the resultant eddies marked by dust swirls, like smoke in some test lab's wind tunnel. I was in a hurry, and was running late after a frustrating morning of trying to get Skype to work. In general Donna, Jack and I will chat at about 0500 my time, 1900 theirs as this leaves some time before Jack's bed and my workout. This morning we couldn't get the video portion to work at all despite several efforts at troubleshooting. It's interesting of course what one comes to consider the acceptable standard of communication. Last deployment (the 1st Gulf War), Donna and I would number our handwritten letters so that if one or two were delayed in the mail we would know what order to read them in. 4 weeks was pretty good turn around time, and the ability to call home after a 45 minute wait in line by a pier side phone booth seemed the height of convenience. Today I'm still irked that all I could do was a voice-only chat from the comfort of my CLU. It's a small enough thing I guess, but gosh it's nice to see their faces.

Anyway, forgive the divagation. Too late to make breakfast, I headed straight to the Green Bean - our little coffee house - for a little fortification against the day's labors. Coffee in hand I made for the EMF. With my hat brim pulled low against the wind (I believe this is the Khamsin - the summer wind from the northwest), I almost didn't notice the group of people gathered near the flagpole on my left. When I did look up I saw that it was most of the medical department - in various states of dress suggesting they had rapidly exited some place without time to locate hats or DCU tops. As I stopped, it occurred to me that perhaps the sirens I had caught wind-whipped strains of as I was walking might not have been a test as I presumed (they do test them some mornings). I walked up to the group. "Fire" said a petty officer, "in medical".

After checking to be sure we were all accounted for, or that steps were being taken to do so, I walked the 50 feet to the EMF. The front doors stood open, and a couple of our nurses and corpsmen were at the entrance. The smell of combusted material - the acrid scent of hydrocarbon and volatiles - wafted out. As it turned out, in one of the OR's, a light fixture had shorted out, causing a small electrical fire, which was in the process of spreading to the adjacent wall and ceiling when our nurses noticed it and quickly extinguished it. This was lucky, as the ORs are unoccupied at that time in the morning, and the fire didn't have a chance to do any real damage. Still the smell was pretty spectacular and has remained so through the first part of the morning. My office in the adjacent ICU was sufficiently aromatic that I've elected to "telecommute" until afternoon to give the fumes a chance to dissipate. Fortunately no surgeries were scheduled, and we have reserve OR capacity readily to hand. Still...pretty exciting stuff for our little clinic. We are getting things back to normal though and should be open for routine sick call this afternoon.

Had been a pretty routine week to that point. Sunday night a few of the officers were invited to a small dinner at the home of one of the embassy's officers, and she and the embassy nurse - a Kenyan native - put on a lovely spread for us. The meal was wonderful - a Kenyan style of baked chicken - and the chance to eat someplace with crystal, real plates and actual silverware was a great treat. Our hostess has been here about 3 years, a typical posting I guess. She will be heading back to the States in a month for the purposes of getting her "tween" age son into a school. When asked though, she was was eager for another chance to come back in a few years. I guess life here, especially outside the camp, is not so charmless at that. We do provide medical care at need to the embassy staff - dental most commonly - and it was a pleasure to get a look at life in HOA from their perspective.

On Monday we were back at Peltier assisting with a bit of rudimentary neurosurgery. A young man with an old (a month or so) depressed skull fracture and a chronic accumulation of fluid beneath the site. Bill assisted the Djiboutian surgeon as they drilled through the skull, and drained the subdural hematoma. He (the patient, not Bill) woke up quickly enough, and time will tell if the decompression of the fluid collection will help him. No word on how the nurses strike was resolved, but we'll presume it was to general satisfaction.

Tonight I must choose between Major Perot's French class and the Morale, Welfare and Recreation trip to the shopping district. I guess you can watch this space for the ultimate outcome. Coming up this weekend is both the wardroom Hail and Farewell at the Hotel Kempinski - a true 5 star resort on the on the tip of the Djiboutian headland - and the EMF going away/weclome aboard party poolside at the American Embassy. I've been to neither locale before, and am looking forward to each happening.

Today's picture has nothing to do with the fire, unless you wanted to make believe my little reptilian friend there could be a dragon. This is one of the skinks that lives under this row of CLU's. I haven't seen him since this photo was taken about a month ago. Could it have gotten too hot for even the cold blooded? For the answer to these and other questions, tune in next time to your faithful Djibouti correspondent. See you then.

Doctor, the Nurses are striking!

Yes, they're very attractive, but that's not important right now. We've got a surgery to do!

Okay I apologize. There may be some medical term for the constitutional inability to resist a good straight line. If not, maybe I could get it named after me...Shapira's syndrome. Hmmm, not bad.

Have I mentioned that the EMF's van resembles nothing so much as "The Mystery Machine" from old Scooby Doo cartoons? Well, there we were, bombing down the Somali road en route to General Peltier hospital to assist with evacuating a chronic subdural hematoma, and then a possible gastrectomy for gastric outlet obstruction of unknown etiology. Given the dearth of diagnostic technology - the countries' only CT scanner is currently broken - surgical exploration of the Djiboutian patient population is like a box of chocolates. Never sure what you'll get, to quote famous medical expert Forrest Gump. The cell phone queeped (Jinkies!) and Bill-the-surgeon answered, turning to us a moment later to say that surgery was on hold due to a nursing strike. Well, actually he said "The nurses are striking." So I said...well you get the picture. We'll try again on Monday.

Besides the doctors at Bouffard (french) and Peltier (djiboutian), there are a couple of French flight surgeons who work at the clinic at the French Foreign Legion base, right across the airport from us. They are nice folks, one chap is from Aix-en-Provence and the other from northern France. They are flight surgeons by training, and fill a sort of emergency medicine/family practice role for their posts. Remember that the French are here for 2 to 3 years at a time, and bring wives and children along to experience la vie djiboutienne. The French clinic thus has a significant pediatric and limited OB/GYN role which we by and large avoid on this side of the runway.

Anyway, Christophe, the northerner and his wife Muriel were headed home for a month's vacation in France, and we got together with them and Christophe's provencal colleague at a nice restaurant en route to the airport last night to make sure that they were properly fed and wined prior to the 7 hour midnight Air France flight to Paris. We went to Restaurant Bel Air, and were seated in their outdoor courtyard for yet another superb franco/ethiopian meal. I had a greek salad with the local feta (hey, all those goats must be good for something), and then grilled grouper (merou in french), and quite tolerable rose, which held up well on the addition of ice. We communicated by means of smiles, gestures and mutual assaults on each other's native tongues. On the whole, I'd say English came out of it better than French. Sigh. Back to Rosetta Stone. Anyway it was a delightful evening.

I'm using Hal Higdon's Half Marathon Training program, and ran the prescribed 7 miles this morning. My hope is to finish both his "novice" and "intermediate" regimens prior to getting back home, with a view toward attempting the Half Marathon Triple Crown in San Diego in 2010. Be that as it may, allow me to observe that even with ESPN on the big screen, and lots of tunes in my iPod, 7 miles is long way to go on a treadmill. I don't think I could last the distance outside however...hopefully come fall it will be a bit more bearable on the outdoor track. Anyway, today's picture shows the Gym - it's the large cement circus-tent shaped structure on the right - and looking past it the dust obscuring the outlines of the eastern camp.

First Netflix DVDs arrived last week, and having watched "The Wrestler" on Friday night, I believe that here in CLU 17 there'll be a Sunday matinee showing of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". As always, movie, music and book suggestions gratefully accepted.

And that's a wrap!

Pet Scan

Well, if the length of the blog entry were to be proportional to the number of things of interest which have occurred since the last entry this one would have ended at “if”. As pictured above, one of our military working dogs (her name is Winni) developed a sore paw, so we brought her in for a quick fluoroscopy of her paw. She was a good patient in general, and although I was intrigued to have the opportunity to assist with veterinary anesthesia, in the event no restraint beyond the comforting embrace of her handler was required. Sigh. You’ll be glad to hear there was no fracture and all seems to be well.

Weather has varied from hot, dry, windy and dusty to very hot, humid and still. Hard to decide between being steamed and being sand-blasted as being the more pleasant state of affairs – fortunately we don’t have to choose!

I got a note from my friend DJ, one of my San Diego based officers who is deploying to Afghanistan. He too has a blog, which deals mostly to this point with his 3 months of training at Fort Riley, Kansas in preparation for his imminent deployment. If the topic of military guys headed overseas interests you, you should check him out at "danieljmt.blogspot.com". Of course, then come back …

The big news here at the EMF is the arrival of the replacements for the majority of the folks here. Most of the officers and enlisted are here on a 9 month rotation – the current folks arrived last November and will head out in a couple of weeks. It is a sort of sociologically interesting phenomenon that a career in the Navy affords one the opportunity to observe repeatedly. That is, as we are rarely in one spot longer then a couple of years, we are always replacing or being replaced – or observing the process. It is interesting to watch the new folks especially as they transition from juvenile wide-eyed newbies never more than a couple of steps away from their incumbent sponsors, to confident-appearing veritable teenagers just itching to get out from under the old guy’s shadow. A symmetrical sort of disengagement takes place on the opposite side as colleagues once passionately engaged in the matters of the day transition into absent minded, slightly vague creatures chafing to be gone. Doubtless this growing impatience for the change to be effected is the product of evolution or benevolent Providence, assisting we sublunary beings to accommodate the unceasing change which is our lot.

Well, I can tell when the philosophy starts, it’s time for me to go. I should mention in passing that today marks the 25% mark for my shorter (7 month) deployment. Well, 26.5% actually, but who’s counting?

Ciao!

A Day at Peltier

Monday was a day of anticlimax - a good thing in Anesthesia, perhaps less so in life's other aspects. As I'd said, we were off to assist our colleagues at the Djiboutian hospital with a sort of challenging case. If you study the neck film on the top you'll see a picture of a very lucky unlucky guy. The bright spot to the viewer's right is the way a bullet appears on x-ray. Many people with a bullet in that location - near some prime real estate in the human body - will not have survived to seek medical care. This chap did make it, still walking and talking, but developed a communication (that's a hole) between his carotid artery and his jugular vein on his wounded side. This turns out to be a bad deal - even if better then the other potential outcomes - as the high pressure blood in the carotid would much rather take a u-turn and head back down the low pressure jugular vein then take much more tortuous and wearisome route to its original destination, the brain. Brains though are pretty particular about getting all the blood they want, and this fellow had many symptoms of low perfusion of his cerebrum. Not to mention the constant hum (we call it a bruit) of the blood gushing from high pressure to low through the small rents in the vessels, which the patient complained about being too loud to sleep through. Finally of course, this type of post-factory modification of the Designer's original plan voids all warranties, and the abnormal junction between the vessels is likely to fail in time, with catastrophic results.

Our mission then was to assist the Djiboutian surgeon and anesthesia team with a fairly complex case, combining such skill as we had and resources as we could spare with those of the good folks at Hopital Generale Peltier. We brought along one of our monitors, some materials for pressure monitoring, and a few drugs that we knew we would want if things went wrong. In the team were a couple of our OR techs, our OR nurse, Bill our surgeon, and Herman and me to provide anesthesia support. We probably didn't both need to go - but heck we've only got one surgeon so anyone who stayed back at camp wasn't going to be doing much. I was going to say that nobody ever comes by for just an anesthetic, but events surrounding Michael Jackson's passing may yet prove me wrong.

Well, although I could talk anesthesia and surgery all day, I'll spare you the details. Our set-up went well despite the failure of our expired carbon dioxide monitor to work as desired. As it turned out, the answer would have been to turn it off then turn it on. Try to find that in the instruction manual though. Anesthesia was uneventful (anticlimactic) and Bill and Dr. Elias quite skillfully found, isolated and repaired the injuries and closed the patient's incision back up. Our wake up was a little slower than we could have hoped. In Djibouti the anesthesia machines use halothane, an older volatile gas that tends to hang around longer than the more modern agents used in more well resourced areas (heck, we don't even teach halothane to our residents anymore). Wake up our patient did though, apparently doing well and with a normal neurologic exam. It was a long day - about 8 hours from our arrival to departure - but a good one. I don't mean to imply by the way that the Djiboutian team couldn't have done the case without us - they are excellent folks and would have done fine I'm sure. As it was it was nice for both sets of folks to have a chance to work together through a case that was a little unusual for everybody concerned.

In any event, the picture on the right is of Herman, Dr. Mustafa and me right before we got started. I'm in the middle. :-)

The next part of the day was to have been the party at the US Embassy celebrating Independence Day. It was to be in summer whites for officers and "business casual" for civilians. I was feeling just the least bit smug for thinking to have Donna send my whites against just such an occasion. As you can imagine, a bright white uniform with white shoes, is an awful potential burden here in the land of blowing dirt, so most folks leave them at home. When you need your whites though, it is nice to have 'em handy. As I started to get dressed, however, I realized with dismay that I had omitted to ask Donna to send along my name tag - it goes over the right breast pocket - and would thus have an incomplete uniform. Argh! As Proverbs 16:18 doesn't quite say "Pride goeth before the fall". (What it actually says is "Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall". Nobody ever quotes that though - the other being a bit more compact and pithy). I thought about it for a while, and decided that although it was a small omission, I didn't want to be out in a uniform that was less then perfect, not at the Embassy and not on that occasion. I called my ride and begged off. I felt like Cinderella on the night of the ball.

As it turned out, the folks who attended had a fine, if hot and sticky time as the affair was held outdoors. I'm sorry I didn't get to meet the embassy folks, but I've met a few as it is and will hope to have other chances. As for me, I went to my CLU, watched the last of season 1 of The Wire, and had a grand night's sleep. Anticlimax again.

And that wraps it up. After some thought, and some advice from my very thoughtful correspondents, I've decided to stay with the blog format. This seems to suit me just fine, and I can't help the suspicion that I'm just not cool enough for Facebook.

Nothing big on the horizon, but rest assured that your faithful Djibouti Djournalist will keep his eyes open and his trusty Mac at the ready. Take care, gentle readers, until next time.

The Fourth

Happy Fourth of July!

It's been a fairly sedate weekend here at this end of the great Rift Valley.  The weather pattern here has entered the season of the "fifties" - this was described to me as temperatures in the 50's (Centigrade), winds gusting to 50 knots, and all lasting 50 days.  We're on day 5.  The wind is now a constant companion in any outdoor activity, and whistles and moans around the outsides of the buildings  at all hours.  I was grateful to the breeze at 0600 on the 4th when I was on the outbound leg of the Fourth of July 5K.  It was a well attended event - there was some fear that they would run out of T-shirts and they were thus promised only to the first 100 or so finishers.  As it turned out we all got one, but it was a near thing.  The outbound leg was to the east, so the wind was a gentle hand, planted firmly in the small of one's back and there was the sensation of near effortless skimming over the gravel of the running trail.  Just past the mile and a half marker though we turned and now the wind was both an impediment to forward progress - like trying to run through warm molasses - and the bearer of clouds of fine dust and sand.  I thought of drafting behind some other runners, but the only ones I could catch up to were shorter than me!  Rats.  Anyway, made it to the finish behind many and in front of quite a few and most importantly, got the T-shirt.  The picture today is of the crew from medical (the runners anyway) prior to the race.  I'm the guy in the white shirt.   All I can say is that from inside them my legs don't feel that skinny.

One of the larger contingents on the course was made up of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force folks, in their bright yellow PT shirts with the rising sun emblem on the breast, and JMSDF on the back.   I'm trying to figure out how to trade a US NAVY PT shirt for a Japanese one, but fear that ours are a bit less attractive and the swap may not seem all that tempting (and of course we can buy ours here on base).   Also, I'd need to speak Japanese.

Later on that day I wandered down to The Oasis - our sort of movie theater - where as part of the day of festivities various patriotic films were being shown.  It was now mid-afternoon, and the feature was "The Fighting SeaBees" starring John Wayne, Susan Hayward and featuring William Frawley in his pre Fred and Ethel days.  As our CO is a SeaBee (well, a Civil Engineer Corps type), there had been a good deal of ribbing about the film on e-mail in the days before the screening.  The film is perhaps not Wayne's greatest role - that would be  "The Shootist" I think - and was a mostly formulaic recounting of the founding of the Naval Construction Battalions in World War II.  What made the experience distinctly odd was the fact that about half a dozen of our Japanese colleagues wandered in as the movie started.  

Naturally, all the action in the movie takes place in the Pacific theatre of the war, and in keeping with the conventions of movies of that era, the screen resounded with casually racist references to the Japanese antagonists of the movie's central characters.  With each utterance of "Japs" and "Nips" I felt increasingly uneasy about things, and by the time statements like "we aren't fighting a human enemy"  were uttered by the cast, I was wondering how I might best slip out the door without tripping over too many feet.  I stayed, in the end.  And at the film's end the lights came up and we all blinked and stretched and smiled at each other and left.

 What an interesting world.  Of course the Japanese officers and men must know the conventions of genre films of the era, and naturally insults in a foreign language never really have the bite they do to a native speaker (this is why goyim casually call each other horrible names in Yiddish like "schmuck" - they may know what it means, but it has no real purchase on the English speaking mind).  And doubtless the Americans come off less favorably then we might wish in Japanese WWII movies (of course I don't know this).  Still, I felt obscurely embarrassed.  Good odds I was the only one - like poor old Basil Fawlty in the Fawlty Towers episode where the Germans come to the hotel, and Basil is so obsessed with not mentioning "the War"  that mentioning it is all he can do.  

Still I wonder what they made of it.   How odd it all seems, with these gentle, elegant, polite men sitting beside me in the mess hall, or running beside me on the Independence Day run, that two generations ago we would have been mortal enemies.  So may it be for our children and our enemies of today.

Can you name the 8 John Wayne films in which he dies (without googling it)?

In the evening I had the good fortune to attend a party given by one of the civilian folks who work with the Combined Joint Task Force here in the Horn of Africa.  She and her partner live in a lovely 3 story place about a mile or so from base.  This was another occasion on which Djibouti seemed to me like Sicily only more so.  For all of the wonderful Italian contributions to design and architecture, most of the new buildings in many Sicilian towns are utterly charmless from outside - concrete slab walls, shuttered windows, wrap around balconies crowded with unused furniture, and surrounded by high walls with barbed wire or broken glass on the top to discourage intruders.   Step through the double locked, steel doors though and you are in the Italy you imagined - tastefully appointed, full of fine and beautiful things and brimming with the warmth of  italian family life.  All this surrounded by the least appealing, most daunting outer walls and facades you can imagine.  Djiboutian construction  is similar, but the circumstances outside the gates are much more dire.

Anyway, it was nice to speak with a different set of folks - met two veterinarians who spend most of their time "down range" assisting folks in Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and the like - and to eat with actual metal utensils.   American barbecue chicken served with croissants, and red, white and blue cupcakes with a superb bourbon flavored icing were the highlights.  It felt like I had been sitting at the kids table for the last 2 months - eating on paper plates with plastic forks - but got to spend a night with the grown ups.  A lovely Fourth.

Reckon I'll stop there today.  Our new contingent of medical folks arrive tonight at 0045ish.  They'll be the replacements for the 35 or so of the EMF staff who didn't change out when we got here.  Needless to say our colleagues have been a bit distractible of late.  Big case tomorrow at the Djiboutian hospital, and a party - in summer whites - at the embassy tomorrow evening.  Stay tuned for the latest in Djibouti's glamorous social whirl...

 

The Summer Wind

Apparently summer here starts on the 2^nd of July.  I say this because when I stepped outdoors at 0530 this morning it seemed like I was standing in front of an electric blow dryer, set to “hot” and full speed.  Humidity…gone.  In its stead a constant, slightly gritty breeze out of the west that takes one at first like that first gasp of heat when you open the oven to baste your Thanksgiving turkey – your muscles stiffen instantaneously as ancient reflexes try to prevent you from imperiling your primitive ape self, but homo sapiens quickly reasserts himself and you reach in to baste the bird.  Of course, maybe this is a bad analogy, as I believe I end up as the baste-ee in this scenario.

Seriously though, there was a moment yesterday morning when the wind – which has been from the east for the past 7 weeks (7.09, but who’s counting) – switched and began to blow from the west.  It’s like that cinematic trope where the coming of the tornado or the hurricane is foreshadowed by the creaky, hesitant movement of the old weather vane on the barn.  Next scene is the crisis – sheets of rain, horses stampeding, Dorothy pounding on the door of the storm cellar.  The equivalent scene here was me peeking out from under my covers this morning, and thinking that the alarm clock must be set incorrectly – it was just too dark.  When I crossed my CLU threshold though, the reason was obvious - the sky was dark with dust.  What had before been a haze, like a cinematic special effect, was now a smoky soup, dimming the light of the sun and thickening the parching air.  As the day has gone on, the sun has brightened a bit, but the air is still startlingly hot at one’s first breath upon leaving the comfort of quarters or office.

Sorry to have gone on at length about the weather, but in a life of general sameness it has been a startling if predictable change.  Not much else of note, truly.  I’ve been afflicted for the past 3 or 4 days by an old and obscure injury which results from time to time in a knot of spasmed muscle beneath my right scapula.  It feels like an epèe may have been run through me – okay like I imagine that would feel – and fades transiently only to transfix one anew with any errant move,  like a deep breath, lifting a cup, or rolling over in bed.  The odd thing is that this is like the visit of an unwelcome relative – not pleasant of itself, but reassuring in its familiarity.  It’ll last a week or two and fade away again I imagine.  Odd how one comes to term with one’s advancing infirmities, making acquaintances of old enemies.  The hidden benefit here is that the only thing which seems to help is running – after 3 or 4 miles I’ll usually be good for a few hours.  Must be the endorphins I reckon, but I like to think of it as Mother Nature’s reminder that the niceties must be observed if I expect this ungainly assemblage of muscle, bone and sinew to carry me along another 48 years.  Okay, enough about that.

Had my second “conversational French” session with our French liaison officer.  This is a class of sorts that he volunteers for on Wednesdays and attendance varies from six or so to just one.  Last night it was the latter – just he and I.  He is a very nice guy with movie star good looks, but no particular teaching method.  In general we’ll just talk in mixed English and French until we get to the limit of my understanding – a short trip – and he’ll write out the relevant phrase on the dry erase board and go over the niceties of pronunciation and idiom.  It’s good review and as it takes an hour out of his time time each Wednesday evening I am duly grateful.

The Fourth of July looms ahead.  There is to be a 5k run in the morning which I reckon I will hazard, and then multiple other activities throughout the day.  The US Embassy is inviting the base officers to a reception this weekend as well, so I’m glad I asked Donna to send my whites out.  In the further term, we’ve been asked to assist early next week with a carotid-jugular fistula (repairing, not creating) at the Djiboutian hospital which will pose some interesting problems.  More to follow.

I’ve been thinking about switching my blogging activities to a Facebook account for various reasons, but don’t know anything about Facebook and thus have no real data upon which to base a decision.  Do any of you social networking savants out there have any thoughts?  I’d be glad to hear ‘em.

I guess that’s it for now.  Hopefully lots of interesting stuff to relate after the weekend.