More life in Togo

Me in my office taken by my coworker the other day.  I spend a lot of time at my desk in front of a computer monitor.  Patients don't come into the office all that much although I do all the physicals which are done at midservice (at one year in Togo) and when the volunteers leave.  The rest of the time much of what we do is over the phone - assessing and telling the volunteers what to do to take care of themselves.  When they are really sick (and not to far away) we will tell them to come into the office sometimes, particularly to get lab work done.  But often they are managed over the phone.  It's kind of an interesting skill to develop - you have to imagine what you are looking at from the volunteer's description so you learn to ask very pointed questions that help you do that.

Pat has been here over a month and we're getting ready to go to Iceland the day after tomorrow.  After worrying about all the arrangements and what could go wrong (it's different leaving from Togo somehow), I've reached a state of peace and am looking forward to what should be the opposite of Togo.  Although Togo is pretty nice right now - temperatures mostly in the 80s with a nice breeze a lot of the time.  I would have never guess that Togo would be a great place to be in July and August from how it was in March, April and May.
Pat has been having a really good time getting out and about in Lome in a way I've never done.  He goes running many mornings and sees a lot of the city that way.  He also strikes up quite a bit of conversations with random people on the street.  He has found pick-up basketball games to play in and has played soccer and basketball for Peace Corps teams comprised of a mixture of staff and volunteers (and some tangentially related people - boyfriends, siblings, etc. - who are good at the game being played).
He and I have been playing tennis at the ambassador's - it really is kind of like our private club - a tennis court and a pool mostly just for us.  My tennis is not good but it's not as bad as I would have thought it would be and we're basically just doing it for fun.  It will be hard for him to leave but we're not thinking about that right now.
So life goes on in Togo - the ups and the downs.  Some days I really like it and other days it just seems so dysfunctional it's maddening.  You really have to learn to go with the flow in a place like this.  It's not like things have to be done all in a rush but, as a dedicated New Yorker, it's hard for me to get out of that mentality that everything should work and run on time.  They're digging up the road outside of our office (which is dirt) and we've heard they're going to replace it with dirt to let it settle for 2 YEARS before they pave it.  It's so hard for me to conceptualize living like that for that length of time but I'll be gone before it's done, apparently.
So next time, pictures of Iceland.