Challaback Bakeshop

5900+ mile trip (so far)

This does not take into account the several hours I spent driving around Yellowstone, Portland, or LA. I did indeed drive from Yellowstone to Portland in one sitting (16+ hours), and apparently took a longer route, since I didn’t know I would do it until I got to 97 degree Boise and decided it was too hot to camp.

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Yellowstone Videos

These were very loud and had an intense sulfur smell like rotten eggs (or like Kristin when she’s eaten a whole bag of Costco dried mangos)

Boiling mud bubbles.

Day Job: Vet Hospital Technician

While I was in Boston, I got to spend the afternoon in a large animal veterinary hospital observing & assisting as a vet tech.

Just like in a human hospital, every several hours, the techs must do rounds to check the vitals of all the patients. There were mostly horses at the hospital on this particular day. First, I checked the horse’s pulse by pushing hard under the muscle along the side of the abdomen. Then I checked for a pulse above each hoof. This is similar to taking someone’s pulse on their wrist, but with a horse, it’s a bad sign if you can feel it. In this case, I could — meaning the horse was sick. Next I took the horse’s temperature with a thermometer which looked just like the regular wide plastic ones. Where? How? Not in the mouth.

Then I drew blood from a horse’s face. To do that, I put my fingers on either side of the horses eye, then drew them down & together until I could feel the soft area below the cheekbone. There is a palette of capillaries there. I took a syringe and stuck the needle into the horse’s face. As I drew the needle out slowly, I pulled back on the plunger until I drew blood. Holding the needle at that position, I continued to pull the plunger until I had a few CCs of blood. Then I took the blood to the lab, spun it in a centrifuge, and measured its serum levels.

Later in the day, a family brought a very sick Clydesdale in the emergency room. The horse was dripping pools of sweat on the floor, and I could see shivers of pain ripple across her muscles. The veterinarians inserted IVs and hoisted several liter bags of saline on ropes above the still standing horse. One vet drew brown cloudy fluids from her abdomen, while another suited up in a long sleeve & half gown. Pumping a softball sized glob of lubricant into his hand, he inserted his hand into the horse’s rectum as far as possible and pulled out a handful of excrement. Repeating the process 4 times, he continued to probe deeper until he reached in 6-inches past his elbow. I learned that he was feeling for the placement of major organs because a horse’s bowels can become entangled with the other organs causing a tear. Indeed, in this case, the horse’s gut had ruptured into her abdominal cavity and the horse was going into septic shock. The veterinarian explained the grim diagnosis to the devastated family.

Before I left, I got to talk to some of the other vet techs. One was planning to open her own large animal ambulatory service. A year prior, she had been badly injured when a horse kicked its leg back, striking her in the face. Apparently, when working with horses, you either want to be so close they cannot kick powerfully or far enough away so as to be clear of all kicking. Although I only notice a small scar on her lip, her soft palate had been shattered by the blow and she had undergone extensive surgery. I did not stand behind any horses for the rest of the day.

I also saw a 4 horned Jacob sheep, and racing horse owned by a Middle-Eastern oil prince. The oil prince was very unhappy because his horse was not getting better. He seemed think this was because female veterinarians at the hospital were taking care of his horse. However, 80% of vet students in the US are female (as opposed to 5% in the 1960s), so he didn’t have much choice.

Vet school and medical school have all the same prerequisites, are just as long, and are just as expensive ($200k+). Plus, vet school is in some ways more difficult because it is comparative across animals, instead specialized in one. Nevertheless, vets can expect to make half as much as doctors on average — about $75k per year. That’s rough.

Being a vet tech for a day was awesome. I would be surprised if I ever became a veterinarian, or anything remotely close, so this was a particularly compelling experience. I learned a lot from talking to people and got to work with animals. Also, did I mention that I drew blood from a horse’s face?

Lessons Learned: Old Documents Exist in Old Buildings

Several weeks ago, a friend introduced me to the Assistant Director of Mali’s National Archives. He and my friend went to college together, and my friend insisted that it would be a good idea to meet with him. Eh, I thought. Can’t hurt. I told him a bit about my research, and he immediately asked: “Have you been to the old Grandes Endemies? L’Ancien Institut Marchoux?” No, I said. I spent much time last summer trying to track down historical public health-related documents at the current National Health Management Office and the Ministry of Health—wondering why the only centre de documentation at either place seemed to be a small room filled with pamphlets published by the Malian government and the WHO. No, no, no, he explained. Those are new buildings. They won’t have the old documents. I am beginning to understand.

At the Ancien Institut Marchoux, now called the National Center for the Fight Against Disease, I found the archivist chatting in a courtyard in the Center’s large compound. He took me over to an old-looking building tucked into a corner of the compound, and opened the door, warning me about the dust. Unfortunately, it seems, old documents in old buildings are rarely in good condition. Boxes spilling over with old papers littered the floor. In the next room, shelves sagged under the weight of so many years of paper. My most striking find was large stacks of photographs of lepers posed so as to show off their most unsightly leprous features to the camera, and to us. Next to these was a copy of the collected works of Vladimir Lenin—perhaps a remnant of Mali’s strong Socialist ties during its First Republic in the 1960s. These next to hundreds of copies of old medical journals—the Tropical Diseases Bulletin, Annales de Medecine et de la Pharmacie Coloniale, Bulletin Medicale de l’AOF—sitting on shelves underneath shelves of unlabeled boxes of papers covered in dust and animal feces. Then, in the National Archives several days later, I found a file with the order slips for these scientific journals. So many copies of the Bulletin de Pathologie Scientifique and the Annales de l’Institut Pasteur, ordered in 1946, and now sitting in the same building where they were likely initially deposited, collecting dust.

The Grandes Endemies “archive” is even more disordered—both the product of neglect and, apparently, an administrative turf war that relegated archival space to a too-small, otherwise unusable room at the edge of the compound, where the light has since stopped working and the dust is quietly taking over. Boxes upon boxes of documentation surrounding the creation and extension of the privatized health care system in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the reams of paper created surrounding World Bank and USAID-financed development projects in the mid-1980s (accounting for every last US Dollar spent), dominate the most accessible part of the building. But, strewn on the floor and buried behind and beneath unused storage boxes are inspection reports from the Hygiene Service in the early 1980s, and descriptions of the visit of an Israeli team of doctors to Mali in the early 1970s. Here, it seems, the archive was moved at some point—but not far. Just far enough to create desperately needed work-space as the public health bureaucracy expanded beyond the imperatives of its colonial origins.

More Ads On a Stick

Somehow, I find these a bit more appealing than the large jars of mayonnaise. As in, I might actually want to drink that much water at some point. Then again, I never want to drink that much Rox Energy Drink. Ever. 

Chicago, Downing, and Spirt Lake

On day 1 of working out in Chicago, I do 60 minutes of 85 degree C1 CorePower vinyasa yoga taught by Alison. Good stretching; feeling great. Ready for more.

On day 2, I attend a 75 minute 90 degree C2 class with Alison & Trevor. At 45 minutes, I go down into child’s pose to rest. Sweat drips like a leaky faucet onto the mandatory towels and yoga mats around me. At 50 minutes, I try to go into an arms-back one-legged airplane pose. At 55 minutes, in downward facing dog, if my life depended on it, I could not continue. At this moment, faced with a yoga death trap, I would have died. Afterward, we spent that afternoon wandering through a crowded street of 10-foot tall leg statutes in Grant Park, listened to the Oona Tramp Band at the faces statutes, and ate Chicago deep-dish pizza.

After lunch & pie in a pleasant Wisconsin café, playing Wii Fit & Wii Sports for an afternoon with Betty Jean, watching Dancing Outlaw – one of 13 must watch documentaries on hillbilly culture, riding mules with Jerry, stopping to pick fresh blackcaps while driving a gator off-road though fields & lightning struck woods, operating a skid steer with a Stout bucket attachment, hanging antique equipment manufacturing neon signs, and eating delicious homemade baked goods, I departed America’s Dairy Land.

Spent the day at a commodities trading office in Royal, Iowa – corn rallied in the afternoon after overnight speculations in futures pushed prices down in the morning. This year’s crop should be record setting with continued cooler temperatures & good rain, but agro & metals are bullish in a downturn; as the economy rebounds off of bailouts, new speculation, and renewed trust, look for shorts on commodities. I am sleeping in Chris’s Spirt Lake guest floor looking out over the water.

Off to the Black Hills Forest, Yellowstone, and Bruneau Dunes for a week of camping, reading, and hiking. Then on to Portland.

Horse Auction

By the end of the trip, I am going to be able to talk like this!

The Oona Tramp Band

Day Trip: Samayana, Saturday, July 11, 2009

“A good road has many consequences,” my friend Lamine explained to me as we narrowly avoided being hit by a huge, white 4×4 speeding along the dirt road that cuts through the center of his father’s village, about 30 miles outside of Bamako, on the road to Guinea.

I had traveled this road before, the first day I arrived in Mali in 2003. After missing my flight from New York, I met up with the SIT group just in time for a trip to Kangaba, down the road beyond Samayana. I remember sitting on the hard wooden benches on the bus, bumping along slowly for three hours on an unpaved, pot-hole-ridden road, arriving exhausted after the bone-rattling voyage. This time, the road was much smoother, and we passed several on-going construction efforts aimed at  further smoothing the road.

Driving there in the morning, we passed large trucks, their large beds empty. As we walked around the village in the afternoon—visiting the school (built by the Japanese, Lamine told me, and Mali’s current President, ATT, but not really built by ATT, explained the eight-year-old nephew accompanying us on our walk, but people he sent to build the school), the new community-supported health care center, the older maternity hospital, and the fields stretching to the horizon filled with newly-planted rice, corn, and, peanuts—we saw the trucks, laden with sand, returning to Bamako to be used for house construction. In addition to facilitating Bamako’s access to good sand, the state of the road has also increased fish prices in the village, now that fish from the nearby Niger River can be more easily transported to Bamako.

The road also inspired Lamine, after living much of his life in Bamako, to attempt to invest in the village. Two years ago, he bought a piece of property visible from the road, and started building a restaurant, which he envisioned as place where all the food would be grown and prepared locally, and would be served to village residents subsidized by inflated prices paid by tourists and passers-by, traveling south along the now-better road towards Guinea. Soon thereafter, however, construction stopped as a property dispute began—filled with predictably confusing claims to the land. Uncles of the man from whom Lamine bought the property emerged from Bamako, claiming that their nephew had no right to sell the property, though he had been its sole caretaker for as long as many in the village could remember. Except, of course, Lamine’s 85-year-old father, who remembered that his family had once owned the land, and had given it as a gift to their neighbors many years before. When the dispute threatened, as Lamine said, to draw blood, he gave up, loosing thousands of dollars. The land stands unused today—except by neighbors drying their clothes on large piles of wood that have been thrown on top of the restaurant’s foundations. After returning to Bamako that evening, Lamine pulled out the officially stamped property title transfer document from the Mayor’s office. Just a piece of paper.