Portuguese and buying carrots

Well, time has been zipping by, and itºs strange to think that we only have just over 2 weeks left here. While we did always go into this not really expecting to speak much in Portuguese, Julia and I have sort-of branched out into different areas. Because she has the mornings free, she often is the one to go shopping, and thus she is very good at buying carrots (yes, she does buy other things - weºve just had a lot of carrots lately!). I, on the other hand, have gotten very good at saying excuse me (as I squeeze past people to get through a crowd at a doorway) and Sorry (as Iºm causing someone a lot of pain - we donºt have much in the way of pain medication here - no narcotics yet, meaning just ibuprophin and Tylenol (not Tylenol 3!). We do apparently have a recent connection with a guy that has a narcotics liscence to import to some hospitals up in Luanda, and is interested in supplying CEML in Lubango, so we may soon have something better to offer.

Iºm not sure how much of our schedule Iºve communicated here already (sending these posts in via email makes looking back a bit more complicated), so Iºll outline it a bit here.

I usually leave at 6:45 for the hospital, getting back anywhere between 6 and 8 PM, depending on how things go. Mondays and Thursdays, there arenºt any general surgeries, so those days are usually more predictable. I also usually take a good chunk of those days as ´project´ days, where I try and help out with an area that needs it. Today I was in a container all day, so I think Iºll wait another week before I tackle that particular elephant again (I almost got a whole one inventoried . It was useful too, as some of the stuff I found will be used in some surgeries tomorrow.

Julia has her first English Class at 11 every day, then one at the hospital at 4:30. In between, she manages to keep herself busy with a myriad of things that Iºve only been vaguely aware of. When at the hospital, sheºs been a great help in getting a number of my ºprojectsº done that were a bit too big for the time I had.
Weekends have been quite erratic, with no ºregularº yet. Last weekend, we went to Namib (a costal town, not Namibia) with the local missionaries for a relaxing time getting battered around by huge waves. As you can probably imagine, I, at least, was loving it.

All of our Nihon no Tomodachi would love to hear that there are scads of snack bars here. In fact, we even have a picture of a place with the name "Snack Bar Central". I will leave it up to you to figure out what that means here.

Unfortunately, we had all been getting our hopes up for the new sattelite modem arriving and being successfully installed only to have them dashed. As it turns out, 2 people got to use the internet while it briefly was up, and weºre blaming the last one for using it all up. Coincidentally, there was a really close strike of lightning around the same time that Peggy used up the last of the internet, but that probably had nothing to do with it.

If there are any lightning experts out there, with some experience in protecting sensitive electronics, I know youºd be more than welcome here. This was the second modem that has been fried (the first was possibly not from lightning, but this second one makes it seem if that was what happened to the first). There are surge protectors on pretty much everything, and the local ºexpertsº have set up a lightning-rod network that was supposed to keep us safe. The funny thing is that nothing else was damaged in a hospital full of sensitive electronic equiptment (aside from this time, the switch that was hooked up to the satelite modem fried on the port the modem was connected to). Does anyone know if you can set up surge protection along a coaxial cable (the send and recieve to the sattelite itself are the only ones that arenºt surge protected. All the network cables between buildings are protected, and all modems and switches are on surge-protected UPSs.

Anyway, it looks as if Iºm out of time here, so more later.

Até logo!