I sincerely meant to update this blog every week, and I really did try to, but all of my efforts were somehow foiled. It would almost be uploaded, then the electricity would go out. The computers wouldn't recognize my flashdrive. The Internet was horribly slow and unreliable. Blogger seemed to be down for a while, or at least never worked when I tried to use it. Let me assure you that I really did try to keep you up-to-date, but the universe conspired against me.
Sooo. I will backtrack and start from where I left off:
Week III
Went to Unawatuna on the south coast the weekend of April 30th.
I saw a snake charmer!!
I took some video footage:
He also had a monkey and a python, and he let me hold both of them. AT THE SAME TIME.
Of course, he wanted money. I asked how much, and he said 2,000 rupees, which is about US$20. Ha. So we haggled for a while, with him claiming that he needed to feed his animals mice and whatnot. Where do you buy mice in Sri Lanka? I can almost guarantee there are no pet stores here, what with all the stray dogs and cats. I seriously doubt people keep mice as pets in Sri Lanka.
He spends every day in one of the most touristy (“most touristy”? Word suggests I change that to “touristiest”, but then it tells me it is not an actual word...) areas, with loads of rich white people desperate to hold his python (heh), and thus he must be making a pretty good living.
Then he said, “But this is my job!”
Does he think envy is going to make me more generous?
The man has an amazing job! He has a pet monkey; he gets to wander around one of the most beautiful beaches talking to people from all over the world; he masters one of the world’s deadliest animals.
I only gave him 200 rupees.
That week I worked in general medicine and the labor room at a women’s hospital. I am pretty sure I will adopt after that experience; I became rather woozy and had to sit down after watching a few births. I was there for a rather unusual case—a fourteen-year-old girl had giving birth about 12 hours before I arrived, and they could not release her because she was refusing stitches (They perform episiotomies quite liberally there, which probably was the main cause of my wooziness—it’s hard to watch someone go at a vagina with a pair of scissors. *shudders*). Teenage pregnancies in Sri Lanka are relatively rare—the doctor told me it was less than ten percent—and the girl had been so uncooperative for so long. They didn’t let her eat anything, because there was a chance she would have to go under general anesthesia, yet she still fought off the doctors, even after going through labor and then not getting anything to eat or drink for twelve hours. They eventually had to physically hold her down and kept slapping her when she was resisting (yeah...they don’t have much concern for patient comfort here, definitely no epidurals in that ward). It was a rather unique experience.
I will write a blog for each week I was there now that I have reliable internet, so keep an eye out! Again, sorry for the delay.
