Pedigrees and Paradigms

Laurel used to marvel at what she referred to as my "pedigree".

The immediate preceding branches of my family tree could not be more different.

East Coast, white collar, well educated, mimosa drinking, thimble thin, tightly wound Irish Catholics on one side...

West Coast, blue collar, live off the land in Alaska, beer drinking, quick to laugh, husky Germans on the other...

I could not love one side more than the other. They are equally as wonderful, loving, supportive, eccentric, world wise, street wise, Godly, faith filled, full of love and family as the other. My family is amazing and I would not change them or our history for the world. I am so blessed.

My sisters and I, aptly dubbed “The Brandt Girls”, have grown into this balance with as much grace as a bull in a china store could hope for. In that I mean to say, that we are two seemingly opposites forced into one body that must now manage to find peace in who we are and where we come from…

We are like bulls in a china shop... but at
least we manage it, though, we do not own it – yet. For many years, well, most of them in my adult life, I have found each of these sides advantageous in one way or  another. It can, though, at times be a bit disorientating

Fall in love with a guy who lives in his VW bus? 

But, of course.

Graduate from an esteemed university?

Check.

Accompany a friend to med school graduation?                                                                      With pleasure.

Navigate the back allies of Tijuana handing out freshly made burritos to prostitutes and heroin addicts?
Okie dokie.

Work as a PA to an NGO director in Hong Kong? Distribute vegetables from a local farm while living in a laundry closet? Move to the DRC? Drive a sports car? Drive a 4x4? Drink espresso? Try pastiche? What country have I woken up in? What do I wear? Will I be cold? Will I be over dressed? Wait, where am I again? What the hell am I doing here???

This week I feel the equatorial straddling of these polarized mores.This week I will go from mud huts and 4x4s to crowds of symphony goers in the Swiss Alps. 

How, you might ask? A magician never reveals her secrets – especially when she has no idea either. As a matter of fact, I am just going on a whim of faith that I will not freak out. It might be just fine and I will not skip a beat or it might be a revisitation of the post-Haiti bread isle in Alberston’s reverse culture shock freak out of 2003.  

But heck, I won’t know until I try, right? 

Plus, I have a real hankering for good wine and being outside at night without fearing for my life. So, here I am, mid-transformation. Do you know how much work it is to shave your legs when it is only worth shaving them every 8 weeks? If not, count yourself lucky. The ridiculous implications my daily life has on my personal hygiene habits is enough for a whole other blog post. No, really, I have already given it much thought long before this.

But for now, do not dwell on the nastiness of man leg hair  – Instead, marvel, along with Laurel and I, at just how good a strategist God is, at how such an odd coupling of gene pools could yield offspring that is perfectly fit for the ridiculously polarized life of a humanitarian aid worker.

I laugh at it – or rather, myself – on a daily basis.

I could be being dramatic, quite honestly, I could be.

However, I started writing this in Entebbe and now, sitting in Dubai I honestly feel like I am living someone else’s life – or perhaps that life I just left behind was someone else’s and this one is me?

Side effects from too little sleep? Perhaps.

I cried like a baby watching Soul Surfer on the plane, it made me so homesick I swear I could taste ocean water on my lips and feel the salt drying on my eyebrows. Strange teary effect often felt in airplanes? 

(It is real, TAL validated my suspicious of its existence) 

I sure hope so, or I have more things to worry about than another sleepless night in another airport.

I need to go find a corner out of these halogen lights.

Far too many of these sentences have begun with "I".

Time to find some other subjects before I bore you...
... or myself.

Oh, and P.S.

Has anyone else ever notice how flipping difficult it is to format blogspot with photos? I spent over an hour trying to let my OCD be OK with how this looks and it is still driving me crazy.

Be Anxious for Nothing – except when on Larium

Hello blogosphere, I write to you from an empty dining room in an Entebbe guesthouse.

I would like to say, that I am no longer taking Larium. 

At first, it seemed that the side effects were not, in fact, affecting me. I have always had nutty dreams, most notably, my dreams have a bad habit of picking up where my day left me off. This is cause for some genuine confusion come morning time. Some of my coworkers who are prone to depression stay away from it, as it can make you more depressed. However, I have not felt more depressed than the expected dose of depression when living in an isolated, impoverished, conflict-ridden village in the dead center of Africa. 

I did notice, however, on my last R&R, there was little of both. I could not fall asleep without my passport, money, Swiss Army Knife and headlamp on the pillow beside me. That way, if anything happened, I would know where the important things were and I could run quickly. 

Now, before you think I sound out of my mind, please, bear in mind my daily life style and the places I have been for recent R&Rs… are they in your mind? Alright then. 

  

So, with that in mind, you may understand that my heightened sense of paranoia is not necessarily unhealthy, but a mere necessity of environmental adaptation. I have assumed thus,blaming all my anxiety on Ango. The thing is, this enlightened level of anxiety 

has been instrumental in getting me through
my day to days at the Ango base. 

Yes, I love my job… but it might be out to kill me. And if not my job, then Ango in and of itself. 

Take last week alone: 6 foot viper in my generator, giant spider watching a movie with me by my head on the wall, giant spider bites all over my legs that are still bleeding 6 days later, 5 days in a row of 14 hour work days, mosquito and fly bites that make me wonder if I have leprosy, lightning strikes, bumpy airplanes, dodgy roads, over exuberant military… I could go on, but I am getting more stressed out just typing this. 

Either way, you get the point. 

So, needless to say, my daily needs of adrenaline, anxiety and paranoia have been perfectly on par with my level of activity. However, like I said, my last R&R I was really struggling with feeling very unbalanced and uneasy. My levels of these usually much required pheromones (Are those pheromones? I don’t think so, but it sounded good.) did not drop as my level of activity and responsibility did. So, I had made it up in my mind that if I could not calm down in Europe this September, it was time for a change in my malaria prophylaxis. 

The other day, though, when I got to Bunia, one of my coworkers was talking about how calm she was after going off of Larium, then another chimed in on how it was making her crazy and another how she was still paranoid even as she was staying at her cousin’s house (an ambassador, who lives in one of the most fortified places you can find in these parts)… So, yeah, that to say, I have quit cold turkey. Now, fellow hostel stayers do not have to endure my talking in my sleep and I do not have to endure waking up to hitting walls with my fist thinking I am defending myself from a carjacker in Nairobi. I guess it is a win-win situation. 

However, with the switch always comes a bit of exposure risk. In my cosmetic bag for my Europe R&R (where I hope to soak in as many Rs as possible), I have a thermometer, two rapid result malaria tests and malaria treatment, just in case. So, yeah, if needed, I will be giving myself a blood test… because I don’t already do enough ridiculous things in my life. 

I am not a Guava

Colby the Colobus - Part Two

That night Colby cuddled in my arms and fell asleep. I gave him tree climbing lessons, walked him around, fed him various fruits and generally spent too much time thinking about how awesome this was.

He would turn when I called his name, run to me when I knelt down and climb on me when I held out my hands.

I loved him.

So, Monday we met and Tuesday I was feeding Colby a guava when it fell out of my hand and he bit the next available thing... me. I immediately put him on his tree stump and started squeezing the space between my thumb and pointer finger. At first, it did not seem he had broken the skin. I had this perfect little arch of purple pressure marks and as I washed with soap and water, two of the little marks began to bleed.

Dang it.

I kept squeezing it, hoping to purge anything that might be trying to invade my blood stream. I went to our medical office, which was sparsely populated with medical staff, but one of our supervisors was there to administer iodine. I had already raided one of my co-worker's rooms for an alcohol wipe from her first aid kit, but I was feeling ultra paranoid. Monkey bites are nothing to mess with.

As iodine was administered to my now barely bleeding hand, I was told not to worry, that anything that could be carried by the monkey could not be helped with any medication. AIDS, Ebola, etc.

Clearly, I needed a second opinion.

So, I emailed our 24/7 on call doctors at InterHealth. Dr. Claire got back to me so quickly and with fantastic advice. All of the first aid intuition I had administered was right on, including squeezing the bajeepers out of my hand. So, yay me. I also needed strong antibiotics and antivirals and post exposure rabies vaccinations... all as soon as possible. Antibiotics we had, but the rest would require a logistical miracle. So, I started making some radio calls, and when they did not work, it was time to bust out the SATphone.

The earliest I could get the vaccinations and myself in the same place was Friday.
That was later than the 48 hours recommended, but that's what I get for living in Ango.

I could wait.

Wednesday morning I woke up to a dying Colby. 

                                By 11:30am he was dead.

I could not wait.

By 2:20pm I was on a MAF plane that was chartered just for me, on my way to Bunia. By Thursday afternoon I was in Kampala at The Surgery getting my post exposure vaccs and various other preventative tablets.

Hour 47 of the 48 hour window. Thank God for an amazing team and good health insurance.

The doctor requested I stay in Kampala for at least a week, to be sure I do not come down with a fever or any other worrying symptoms. So, here I have remained. Pretty bored, missing Ango and really feeling like I have not worked much in the last month.

Though I have had no fever, I have felt sick all week and so lethargic. I am told by wikipedia that this is rather common when taking 34 pills a day of heavy-wide-spectrum antibiotics and antivirals. It has been hard to focus on working from here, even though I had high hopes. I just feel like vomiting and laying down all the time.

Hopefully these side effects will subside now that I am only on one of them. I want to go back to work, I want to fix some recent mistakes I have made there. I want to never have a pet monkey without a local vet.

It was fun while it lasted. It makes for a very dramatic story, though at no time did it actually feel dramatic.

In the end, I made it into our country program's monthly Situation Report that gets sent to HQ:

"Courtney Brandt was bitten by a monkey on 19^th July and medivaced to Kampala for preventative treatment. She arrived at the Surgery in Kampala 47 hours after the accident."


And onto InterHealth's website for World Rabies Day:

"At InterHealth we often come across weird and wonderful cases of infections, and rabies is no different... An aid worker in rural Democratic Republic of Congo had been vaccinated against rabies. She encountered a cute baby colobus monkey half way through her project. Unfortunately, the baby monkey playfully nipped her. She wasn't close to medical facilities and required a semi-urgent medevac to complete the post-exposure treatment."

                                                                                                                      So, that's something.

Ango Awesome

Monkey See, Monkey...

Colby the Colobus – Part One

I was walking from the base to my office when I noticed a bit of movement in the grass. A baby colobus monkey was tied to a tree behind the Medair Camion that had just come in from Isiro. Hassan, our camion driver, caught me looking at it and said it was not mean. Indeed it was not, when I moved closer, it jumped on my knee and clung to my t-shirt, hopped to Hassan and stole the paper from his hand.

Hassan said he bought the monkey on the road after its mother had been killed for bush meat. He thought it would make a good alarm at night. You see, driving from Isiro to Ango, takes about a week, with a good driver. The roads are difficult to maneuver, when it rains you can be stuck easily, there are rivers to cross, you cannot drive at night… the list goes on and on. So, a driver is camping out by the truck every night, and in LRA territory, having a monkey wake you up before anything else might, is a pretty darn good idea.

That night, the monkey did not stay in the truck, but in a basket in our base. I fed it and played with it all night. It was so young, still working on its coordination, but it clung to my arms and cuddled on my shoulder, then fell asleep. I was in love.

In the morning, I was up at 6am, skyping with Colby (his new name) to California. A great start to the day. I took some token photos and ate my breakfast.

On the way to the office, Hassan stopped me and asked if I wanted to keep Colby. I laughed, then I thought how flipping rad it would be to have a pet monkey. I consulted a half a dozen locals, a baby monkey care website and, of course, Wikipedia. By all accounts, the colobus monkey is docile, kind and a lot of people in these parts keep them as pets. I was torn, as I thought it was too young to survive without its mother, but with its mother dead it was either me or the drivers. I made the executive decision that my womanly instincts would serve little Colby better and we waved goodbye to the Medair Camion.

To be continued…

Yes, Just Like That

I was on video Skype with my mom in California and Léo, one of my guards, came by. I explained to him that he was talking to my mom in real time and that was her on the computer screen. It took a while, but he then understood...

Léo exclaimed "Oh, its like the photocopy machine!"
"Yes, just like that", I replied.

Please keep in mind, before Medair arrived, Ango had not even seen a mobile phone, nor had ever had electricity.

Words will come...

Watching local university students do a rather entertaining drama addressing the issues of health,
 family planning, poverty, using your resources well, dangers of drugs
and services available from the local organizations.

Distributing donated notebooks as a graduation present to the kids of this school who wear donated Hong Kong Rugby Sevens jerseys and H&M hats as their school uniforms. 

Waving hello to all the people in Hong Kong who helped make it easier to learn that year with clean clothes
and school supplies in their mud walled, dirt floored classroom. 

The teachers also use donated sports jerseys as their uniforms.
From my experience working in various communities in Africa, having the same clothes really represents a sense of unity and belonging.
Often, for special days you will see ladies with the same fabric used to make all their dresses.
This sense of unity that some simple shirts brought to these classrooms was palatable. 

A rural community gathered in a church to welcome their "visitor from Hong Kong".
The pastors danced in the grey suits we often ship and
I was impressed to see how sharp they looked in these rather drab suits. 

Gathered in front of a community center with many of the people who were watching the drama that day in the slums.

Seeing Fruit

Not often do we get to see the fruit of our labor, especially in aid work. You work hard to do good by the population you are working with, but often your time is never long enough to allow you too see with your own eyes the results and outcomes of the input.

This weekend I have been blessed. 

I am in Bujumbura with two organizations that shared a container I worked on funding and logistics for months in Hong Kong. I liked these organizations, thought the work they were doing was innovative and also liked their attitude of corporation and collaboration with us and between themselves. I even wrote about them in an update. The container was finally cleared from customs in January and they are still distributing items from it. Yesterday, I went with them to Buterere, a slum near the airport where they do much of their work. I always enjoy watching how NGOs that are started and run by local populations work, as it is generally different than their western equivalents. 

I watched as local university volunteers preformed a well received drama promoting health, forgiveness, family planning and the services they offer. We visited several homes in the area who will be receiving goods sent by Crossroads. I listened as people were encouraged to use the intelligence and creativity they have to change the world around them, even though they have limited resources. I was inspired. 

The next day we went out about 30km to a village that was badly affected by the war. I was greeted by a large group of singing, dancing, drumming, hugging people and ushered by them into a church where they had assembled. I was able to tell them about the people in Hong Kong who donated the goods, all the team in Hong Kong who worked on getting that shipment to them, I encouraged them that it is all of our work together that can change the world. 




We need to all do what we can and in amazing ways it can come together like this - like people who worked for many many hours to make this shipment happen on opposite sides of the world coming together under a humble mud church to meet together, talk about solutions to their poverty and struggle to survive. 

Though I left very inspired and sure that the work in Hong Kong is good and changing lives, the trip was not without its disappointments. I did, though, get a unique chance to talk with these local leaders about how they themselves can be creative when faced with difficulties in making rent, transporting goods and people, etc. 

I tried to take the opportunity to encourage, to try to get these community leaders to think outside of the tight box that constrains grassroots organizations who have all the heart and intelligence and drive to work in the most difficult parts of their nations, but lack resources. But everyone has something, we just need to figure out what to do with it. 

Nothing is ever easy. 

Ever.

More thoughts and photos to come.