Duped again

Hi! Things are still going pretty well here and nothing too eventful to report. Yesterday I went with Sr Vicky to a town called Daloa that’s about an hour from here and is bigger so we went to buy school supplies and medicine. The whole thing took a little over 6 hours and I found it kind of stressful because we were trying to fit so much stuff into the truck and nothing could go in the back since it was pouring. We went to 3 different groceries stores because at the first 2 they were out of stuff we needed. I was hurtin for a Costco.

Today was the dispensary and it was a little rough for me. It was going fine until this woman came in with this girl who was like 7 and said that both of the girls parents had died and her grandparents too and she had no siblings. The woman was her great aunt and had just started taking care of the girl. Sr Vicky gave the girl some medicine and told the great aunt where to enroll her in school but the woman came back a little later because the school was too expensive ($20 for the whole year). This was a little much for me and I started crying only to find out later that the story was a lie. How messed up is that! I was all sad and wanted to pay her tuition and everything. At lunch Sr Marguerite really laughed at me (in a nice way) and proceeded to tell me about 5 stories that were as tragic if not more tragic than the girl’s from this morning. All the stories were fake and it was just people trying to get the sisters to pay their kids tuition. It really sucks that people do that but if I were as poor as these people Im sure id be doing the same thing. Especially if there was some overly sympathetic and gullible American within earshot…

Then about an hour later this 16 year old married girl came in who was pregnant and after I took her blood pressure and sr Vicky did her exam, the girl started crying. At this point I didn’t know that the previous story was fake and I was still a little upset about it. So heres this 16 year old girl crying over her pregnancy and then I started crying. I think I hid it pretty well but I felt really ridiculous. She was probably wondering who in the world I was and why I was crying. Sr vickys commentary didn’t help. It went something like this: ‘You know Catharine? (a girl at the boarding school) Shes her same age. But she wont be playing soccer. No. Only babies. Just babies for her. How many wives does her husband have?’

At lunch after sr marguerite had finished making fun of me for crying about the first story she agreed that yes this second story was indeed very sad.

So that’s the dispensary update. Im doing some English stuff with the oldest girls at the boarding school so I should go get ready for that.

Thanks for reading!