Clocks and Whitney Houston Hair

Last night I discovered that AED, the pre-medical honor society that I belong to, had given me an HIV/AIDS epidemic evolution DVD that I happened to bring with me to Africa. And, as I looked through the contents, everything that the lecture talked about was the exact information I needed for my thesis. How perfect is that! It’s going to be a fabulous resource, so that’s amazing news for me. Today was really quite uneventful in the office. We didn’t do a whole lot, but we did scrub in for another circumcision today. It was just the same as last time. Funny thing though—after Dr. Khan has done all of the cutting and cauterizing, he sews the skin back together. Did you know that dissolvable stitches are made out of cat gut, by the way? Anyhow….as he goes about the whole procedure, he explains everything very well to us, and makes sure we can see everything that he’s talking about. When he sews the skin back together, he talks to us about the “clock”…can you imagine what he’s talking about? On the bottom side of the penis is a pretty visible line, and he stitches that together first, and that’s called six o’clock lol as we were well informed. Then he stitches the top together, which is twelve o’clock. Then he does nine o’clock, and lastly three o’ clock. Then he stitches the spaces between the four clock marks. I have never heard of somebody comparing surgical procedures to a clock; it was kind of wrong lol.

We picked up our rental car, for the last time in Durban, this afternoon. The car that we were supposed to get was late for some reason, so they upgraded us to a nicer car that was already there for the inconvenience; how nice (: We headed to the Durban Stadium because we found out it has a skyrail! If you look up a picture of this stadium, it has two poles that run from both sides of the ground beside the stadium, to all the way up above the stadium, where they connect. On these pole structures, they have sky trains that can take you all the way to the top to get a lovely view of all of Durban and the Indian Ocean. We wanted to go, but when we arrived, were informed that it was closed down for the rest of the day for maintenance, and that it would be running again in the morning. We will most likely go tomorrow, but if not, sometime this weekend. Tuesday is a holiday, so we have an extra long weekend again. We are going to go on the sky rail, to the beach behind the Casino, to the Gateway mall (the largest mall in South Africa—we didn’t even finish looking through half of it last time), and to a place called Ushaka. Ushaka is this mega water world/aquarium/shark and dolphin diving/shopping mall/beach front/craft boardwalk/restaurant and nightclub hot spot. It’s like everything in one, and it’s humongous. It is the home to the tallest water slide in South Africa, which I will NOT be going on haha. It should be really fun, so sometime this weekend we will spend a whole day there.

I also got in contact with the bishop down here, and since this is the first weekend I am staying in town, he is picking me up for church on Sunday morning. I’m pretty excited; I’ve missed it a lot, plus it will be an adventure to go to church in a different country. And just an “entertain the idea” ‘tidbit’ (auh I hate that word) for the day, I woke up with hair like Whitney Houston. Because of the humidity, my hair curls up really tight, so it look shorter and is more afro-like than in Washington. I usually take a bath before I go to bed here so that my hair can dry during the night and be ready to go in the morning. In Seattle if I took a shower at night I wake up and my hair is still half wet, and the dry parts are hideous and unstyle-able. Here, I wake up to lovely curls that I usually don’t even have to touch; most of the time I just do my makeup because my hair already looks styled. And my curls look so much better here due to the humidity; who would have thought?! I was preparing for the worst, only to be pleasantly surprised by the best. Anyways, today I woke up to hair that was a little bit wilder than usual—very afro like and big. I was going to put some more product in it to get it to lay slightly flatter, but Uncle Roy got here early this morning and I didn’t have time to! So my hair was very Whitney Houston-esk and afro big (: almost like woah daddy. And to top it ALL off, it was windy today, which only made my hair bigger. Miles got a pretty good laugh out of it.

I was wearing my pajama shorts tonight, and Zola walked behind me and patted my butt, and goes “woah, why do you have a booty??” it was pretty funny (: