Stanley

The past couple of weeks have been my favorite at work. Everything at PATA is in a crazy mode now with the forum coming up. All of the big things need to get purchased, reserved, and booked so that we can attend to the little details. We have almost purchased all of the plane tickets for the 20 clinic teams from the 10 Southern African countries and Nigeria. The hotel is reserved, which I get to stay in for the duration of the forum (so excited). The academic program is almost complete with our guest speakers set to fly in from all over the world.

One of the main projects I have been working on is now almost complete: the 100-200 page proceedings book from last year’s forum that I transcribed and developed. My name gets a place of importance in the credits since I pretty much did the entire thing by myself, despite having not attended that forum last November. I even wrote the introduction thanking everyone for making the forum such a success (which was semi-difficult since I wasn’t there).

We hosted a local forum in Swaziland this past week, and are having one in Tanzania and two in Malawi over the next two weeks. After that everything will calm down and we will only have basic things to get done before our big week is here with no more local forums until February.

The wind this past week has been stronger than ever. Everything shakes and rattles and blows around. I almost got blown over walking home from the bus station. Our sliding door was open a bit and somehow the wind blew the painting off the wall and sucked our blinds partway outside.  It definitely is a challenge trying to get anywhere when the wind behaves like that. We went up to the sauna and the sauna door (which is all inside) wouldn’t stay closed because of the wind pressure on the windows and gushing around through invisible cracks somewhere.

This weekend I got locked inside my apartment.  We have nicknamed our door “Stanley” because it constantly opens and even closes by itself, particularly if the sliding door is open.  The door mechanism isn’t strong enough to keep it in place unless the door is locked. We get really annoyed with “Stanley” and have to keep our door locked almost at all times to prevent it just opening up when no one is in the living room. We had it locked and Lisa came over to hang out. We tried to unlock the door to let her in and couldn’t. The lock wouldn’t turn. We slid the key under the door and had Lisa unlock it from the other side which worked.  Thus Saturday night we had to get a locksmith out and get our keys changed. Last time, about a month ago, I got locked out of my apartment when the door broke so when you turned the key it unlocked but the door still wouldn’t turn to open.  Then I was trapped outside for a couple hours until they could break in.

Sunday I went to get something out of the bathroom and realized that the ceiling was leaking, walls crying and the floor soaked.  We called Connect who got plumbers out to see what the problem was, since clearly something was happening on the floors above us.  Apparently a valve burst in a room on the 9^th floor directly above my room (I live on the 6^th). That room was completely flooded throughout the entire apartment. The water damage went all the way down to the ground floor. It was worse because I was the first one to call in the problem since no one was home on the 9^th, 8^th, or 7^th floors. Our apartment had two inches of water in all the bathrooms and the hallway carpet was soaked despite us putting down roughly 15 towels. The water kept creeping in for several hours. Finally it was contained and the vacuum/drier guys came to suck up the water out of our carpet and bathrooms. The carpet was just grossly damp and now is almost dry. 

Thankfully the weather was not very good this weekend, with wind, clouds, and rain so it wasn’t that big of a deal that I was trapped mostly inside dealing with all of the situations.  We have the “emergency” number in our phone that calls one of the volunteer placement coordinators. I have never had to call this number, but I did twice this weekend so at least I know now that the number works.

I am leaving tonight on my great Southern African adventure through Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and South Africa.  I am not sure what internet access I will have, but regardless I won’t be posting on my blog until after I get back on November 5.  I should have some awesome pictures!