Through the Seasons

She Loved It

I was so excited to give Mama Imanueli her gift I almost didn’t greet her (a big no-no in this culture!).  We went through the greetings and I told her I had a gift for her.  I held it up to show her and could tell she didn’t know what it was.  I opened it and explained how you keep pictures in there.  Oh.  She was so happy.  She thanked me and hugged me and held my hand.  It was a bit awkward because we had a cross-cultural experience – making sure we were doing what was okay in the other’s culture.  It was great though and I’m happy that she now has a place to safely keep (and show off) her pictures.

A while later she came back to the door and asked to come in.  I told her to come on in but instead of opening the door as usual she said she needed my help.  Well, that’s odd.  So I went to the door and found that she had cut her hand washing dishes.  And she came to me for help.  Um.  I don’t do blood.  But I wouldn’t NOT help her so I grabbed my cell phone to call Jonathan.  No credit.  I picked up the home phone and realized I didn’t know how to use it.  So I emailed him a subject line “urgent” and a message “call me”.  I waited.  And waited.  Okay, so that’s not the quickest way to get help.

I asked her if she needed the landlord (who I later learned wasn’t here anyway) and she said, “I don’t know what to do.  I was scared so I ran over here for help.”  Yikes.  Talk about feeling inadequate.  I had her wash it off in filtered water then I put some Neosporin on it and a bandage.  Finally, Jonathan called and I told him what happened.  He literally ran home to look at it.  Sure enough, it needed stitches.  We couldn’t figure out the word for stitches when we were explaining what the doctor would do and then it hit us – he would “sew” it up.  We knew that word!  Ooo, she did too and said she was scared.

But off we went to the hospital.  We were in and out in no time.  She did, indeed, get stitches and some medicine for healing.  We paid for her expenses – a whopping $4.50 for the whole visit including the meds.  Crazy!  She thanked us over and over.  It was quite an experience and we were just glad we were here to be able to help.  Now I have to figure out what to have her do here tomorrow because she’ll do anything she’s asked but I know certain things wouldn’t be good for her hand.  Like washing dishes!