Early Morning Traverse

At 5am light is already finding its way into my window.  Even though it’s a Saturday, and I just worked a full week of 14+ hour days, my alarm pulls me up out of a restless sleep.  It seems that all sleep is restless, when it’s 90 degrees outside, the mattress has a comfy hole in the middle of its foam, and you might wake up to a lovely praying mantis corpse attached somewhere on your mosquito net.  But the day has started.

I grab breakfast (yesterday’s bread with Nutella), shove a soda and a cookie or two into my backpack, and walk across the street to the store compound.  The logistics supervisor there is already in full swing, munching his serving of bread as he watches drivers complete their daily checks of the landcruiser fleet.  We exchange pleasantries that mostly take the form of grunts, establish that all drivers are either already at the office waiting to depart, doing their checks as we speak, or on their way.  Except one.  I hand him my phone with all of our departments’ numbers, and wander over to the generator to say good morning.  She’s an old beast, with nearly twice the hours of the recommended cutoff for end-of-life.  All good here.  The log sup hands me back my phone, and I climb into the next departing vehicle.

At the office, I greet the team of 7 chipper nurse supervisors.  This is day 5 of this round of distribution, and day 2 of the early wake-up, so they are well-settled.  After some last-minute consultations, supplies, mapping, photocopying, and equipment checking, we climb into our respective cars and head off into the bush.

I’ve chosen to ride along with a car going to the East Axis, which means a trip across the river.  We load up, climb in, radio into the control room that we’re on route, and take off after the other car going East.  We settle in and get rolling, and 500 meters later we pull up to the ferry.

We stop, get out, stand around, say hi to the ferry operators, and generally go back to what we were doing at the office.  False start.  After a couple minutes, the ferry operators get the huge engine going, and we make the quick trip across the 60-meter wide river.

The sun is coming up as we start the journey, and mid-river, it breaks through the clouds.

Cool.  Not a bad way to start the morning.

We land, get back in the car, and head on our way.

We’re off to supervise the activities at the distribution sites for our prophylaxis campaign, where we’re giving free malaria-prevention medication to children under 5.  We’ve also taken this opportunity when every family in the district will search out this medicine to increase the vaccination coverage of children less than 2 years of age.  It’s a huge undertaking with many staff, resources, and numbers going to make it a success, and it is very popular with the population.  People will travel from great distances in neighboring districts to receive the prophylaxis.  This is our second of four distribution this rainy season.