Nurse Abby and football

At the beginning of each week Dana, Virginia, and I always talk about what is going to happen this week to make it interesting or different. We always have something happen that is out of the ordinary and we are always trying to figure out what is going to happen. This week we first had the lice incident. I spent a majority one night taking lice out of Virginia’s hair. The next night we did my hair because I started scratching the next day in school. After school we went on a major de-licing of the house. We all consulted with our mothers on how we should get rid of it from our house. We were told that we need to wash everything in hot water. Hmmmm…. Well we don’t have hot water at the house. So we pulled out a big pot and boiled some hot water and soaked all our towels, bed sheets, and everything else that was near our heads. We are on a strict no sitting on the couch’s for three days because we think it might be in the cushions. We luckily have bar stools that we have been sitting on lately. I can’t wait until we are able to sit back down on our couches.

On Thursday night after school I was face timing my mom when Virginia came over and got me. She had told me that one of our students who had recently got bit by a dog came over because his leg was hurting. We had told him to come by the house if it was hurting and we would try and clean it out. The three of us have very little experience with dealing with this matter. Thankfully growing up on a farm led to us having a lot of accidents where we needed wounds to be cleaned. My mom is also a nurse and finds pure enjoyment out of cleaning our wounds. As my dad would say she likes to inflict pain on us when we are injured. She really finds enjoyment in cleaning out wounds. After watching her for many years I have picked up on how to clean up injuries. I have never EVER been one to clean wounds it always grosses me out. For some reason when I hear about something happening to my students I go into like a mama bear mode. I want to do whatever I can to help them. So I rolled up my sleeves and cleaned the dog bite on the student’s leg up. The next day in school the student had came up to me and thanked me for helping them because it had felt so much better after being cleaned.

I had thought after cleaning the dog bite, my duties were done but poor Virginia had gotten blisters on her scalp from the lice. The blisters were oozing puss so I tried my best to get them clean. She had also gotten bug bites that had caused her feet to swell up and the bug bites opened up and also started oozing. This is when we decided that it was time for us to head to the doctor. On Friday morning we had left school early to head to the hospital. Virginia had her wounds, Dana’s eye was infected, and one of my ear’s has been clogged feeling for the last month. We had spent 4 hours waiting in the waiting room at the hospital. The hospital here is a little different to the ones back home. We spent maybe five minutes with the doctor in our visits. We each only had to pay twenty dollars to go visit the doctor and we read that to have a baby here it will only cost you fifty dollars. Since we were in the main island we also got the opportunity to pick up our packages. I love the days in which we get to pick up packages and letters. Big shout out to my grandma for sending the pan of bars they are so good! I really do appreciate anything that comes from home. I also got some letters from back home and I love getting all the mail and hearing from everyone.  We got home from the hospital and I looked down at Virginia’s feet and noticed they never cleaned them at the hospital. She had three toes that looked super infected. So I made her sit down on the bar stool and soak them. I could see sand sitting on the top of the wounds. So after soaking and cleaning them we put bandages around them to keep the sand and dirt out of them. They had looked so much better after that and she said that they had felt a lot better. I was really surprised that the doctor’s office didn’t do anything for them.

On Saturday we headed back to the main island again. All of our friends on island were heading to the championship football game for their high school. They call it “funky” for short. I am not real sure what the actually name of the school is. They don’t have college sports on island because they only have one college, which means they make a really big deal out of the high school sports out here. We were playing Tafuana High School, which is a really big rival team. They spilt the island into east side and west side instead of having conferences like we do in the states. When the teams are in the championships they also have a competition to see which team can have the best decorations. Our side of the island was just filled with red and on the bus ride over you could just feel the excitement of the game. For the game we got there right before it had began. We had to walk in front of everyone in the stands. At home this would have been totally normal with me. When you are the only three white girls there we could just feel the eyes staring down at us. Thank goodness for our Aunuu people being at the game and having us sit with them and feel welcome. Somehow we got put in the middle of the student section for the game. You can only imagine how out of place we all felt being placed in the student section but we all embraced the opportunity and cheered for Funky. The game was also a really good game at half time we were down by quite a bit but we pulled it together and won in the end. It was fun watching all of our friends react to winning the championship. One of the big things out here is when a team loses they get really upset and throw rocks at the winning team. So after the game all the funky fans had to get on school buses and get escorted out of the game by the police. We had piled a whole bunch of fans onto a school bus and then closed the windows just in case rocks got thrown. Do you know how hot it was on that bus ride? Yeah I remember just looking around and everyone was sweating. We were on our way back when all of the sudden everyone on the bus ducked down and sure enough someone was throwing rocks at the bus. I swear we never have a boring day here. Don’t worry everyone was completely safe and no one got hurt. We finally made it back home for the night and after the busy week we are all exhausted. Thank goodness for a short week at school. We also have spirit week again this week at school and we are playing different games everyday since it is thanksgiving week!

With Love,

Abby