I look to see what's brushing my leg. I saw a giant spider as I brushed my teeth. Not tarantula-quality, but it looked pretty competent none-the-less. My leg is assaulted by my T-shirt, not some killer bug from hell. Cool, now to get some sleep.
I'm squeezed into a small tent, pitched on the dirt road, a few meters in front of our car. We set off on an explo today, meaning we are going into a district MSF does not work in (currently) and checking things out. We will try to determine the population's access to health care and their need, if any. We are specifically looking at malaria, which is fortunate for us, since this is the start of the peak malaria season. We'll find plenty if patients, but the trick is looking deeper. We have many pages of parameters and evaluation criteria to help us with our final report, but we only have a loose idea of where to go and how to get there.
One thing we are sure of is that the main route between the district that we just vacated and the district we will be exploring, if you want to call it a main route, is terribly, inconveniently horrible. In French, "full of holes." Which is apropos, considering we just spent 7 hours getting our car out of a hole. We are now camped 100 meters further down the road, which was the first flat, dry spot for the tents that we saw. We will restart tomorrow, but for tonight we tried to rub the sand off, stripped out of our soaked clothes (it's rainy season in the Congo. 7 hours does not pass without at least some rain), ate a cold dinner of tuna and crackers, and crawled into our beds to gain whatever sleep we could before we set off again tomorrow. Morning. Around 6am.
Since it is almost midnight, I'll leave it there. Goodnight.
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