Magic
I tried to introduce the concept of grafting to a (hilarious) health volunteer friend of mine, who told me to stop making up Lord-of-the-Rings magic-type lies. How could you take a piece of one tree and stick it on another, improving the trees and even changing the type of fruit it produces? Grafting is pretty much the coolest thing I’ve done in my life. Yesterday we started the grafting of 800 avocado trees, the first step in my master plan to turn my village into the hub of guacamole-making in Tanzania.

Amazing Guests
“If you saw me on the street, would you ever believe I have AIDS?” the young woman asked a group of my villagers. They adamantly shook their heads. How could such a stunning, cheerful, confident young woman be infected with the deadly disease? I invited two people living openly with HIV to come to my village and talk about their experiences with the disease, and halfway through the young woman realized that her audience thought she was acting. She then pulled out her record of CD4 (white blood cell) counts at the hospital to prove it to the group of women she was addressing. More self-assured than the vast majority of females in the village, our guest shared her story of getting married, falling sick with tuberculosis, the death of her husband and youngest child, getting tested for HIV, and how she now lives positively with her remaining two children. Stories like hers are so common among young women. The difference is that she is one of the few who has been tested and has begun to take antiretroviral drugs, which have changed her life. She appears strong and healthy, and asserts proudly that she could now ride her bike all the way to town without any problems, while in the past she was bedridden. The two guests made quite an impact on me, and I hope the villagers were as moved as I was.

Yet More Fatness
While filling out the cards used to chart the weight of growing children, I asked the nurse what she intended to name her future kids. She said it was funny I should ask because she had just been telling someone the other day that if she has a girl it will be named Gail (but spelled Gell so that people will be able to pronounce it), and a boy will be named “Beckham.”
I will add to the growing list of excellent names: Redness (and her brother Swelling?), God, Nitishie ("Scare me" in Swahili), Rechina, Bathroomeo (ok, maybe it had only 1 “o”), Enjoy.