Eating my words

I've had tablefulls of little boys this week, and I need to change my previously stated opinion. Little boys can be very sweet and I like them a lot. They like to do very different stuff, but they are great fun too. For instance, I now know two magic tricks. (They are tricks when I do them since I'm not a pro). One is a card trick and I'll admit I'm pretty good at it. The other one involves a slight of hand. Apparently I have lots of enthusiasm for this one, but little finesse because it's a lot harder. Little boys also like the rattle snake eggs that I brought from home. You know those touristy packets with the paper clip and rubber band that rattle when you open it, making you feel like the eggs have hatched. Khadija wrote on the packet in Arabic so that I could produce the desired suspicious effect before the victim opens the packet. In short fear of snakes is pretty universal!! I've even done it to some of the moms and they will laugh pretty hard at each other.

This past week Barbara has been in the asthma ward with me. She's 85 and wonderful. The first day we observed a lot of the physical therapy, which I described earlier. She said the technique that they use to bring up the mucous is called cupping. It's nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of during the morning, because she knows a lot about asthma. I enjoy her company a great deal and it's also fun to see how the children interact with her. The older ones like her a lot and she gets to work with them on math and reading and then they write her name in Arabic. It's pretty sweet. I did have to tell her this morning though, as I was late for the bus that she needed to move slower so that we could blame our late departures on her age and not my tardiness. We'll see what happens on Monday.

Placement has been really good this week, everyone who works at the hospital is getting to know me and so they all come around to say hi. The kids look for us in the morning and it's fun to walk by their rooms and say hello. I get so attached to some of them, I don't want them to go home, but you've got to be happy for them too. The amount of phone numbers I have been given from moms is tremendous, it's a good feeling.

Other things that I've been up to this week are the hammam and hanna. The hammam is a public bath, where you can pay someone to scrub you down like nobodies business. I haven't felt so clean in a long time. Hammams are social activities like going to hang out at the beauty parlor, but their is a lot more too it than that. I would rank it up there with Fes as far as must experience personally, because words don't exist to describe the ritual. Because I was sqeaky clean after the hammam, Khadija put hanna on my hands. I've long felt that hanna wasn't for me. Turns out that's just not true, I just had my feet done last night and they are zwina bzaaf (very beautiful). It helps that Khadija is an incredible hanna artist, because I have beautiful flowers around my ankles and vines down the tops of my feet, with fronds and all.