On-going saga of crashed plane

Remember the mysterious plane crash nine months ago? (See posts of January 5 and 25 and February 1.) Well, after months of dithering over who would pay for it, a US or Cypriot salvage ship (depending on the reporter) was finally hired by the airline to go retrieve the black boxes. The ship was equipped with sonar, underwater cameras and an unmanned robot capable of going as deep as 6,000 meters (20,000 feet). The ship arrived in the region last week. It took a few days to finish the last paperwork details before it was finally permitted to proceed to the crash site. It sounds like it was almost overladen with rubber-necking officials, local and foreign, as it churned its way to the site. Nevertheless it finished its mission in short order. Today it was announced that both black boxes were retrieved from a depth of around 2000 meters. Local papers mentioned that other wreckage assumed to be from the plane was also retrieved from the sea floor but that no human remains had been spotted. After 9 months I suppose not. The black boxes were immediately sent to the US and some reporters opined that they would be read within the week and analyzed within a month. I’m not holding my breath, but I am very curious as to the findings.

Sina's Feet

In case you were wondering, Sina's feet are better now after having kept them wrapped in banana leaves all week. Hmmm, maybe we could patent it???

Another war

There’s a war going on south of here, with government troops fighting against rebels. (Actually this sort of off-and-on skirmishing has been going on for years, decades even. But a couple of months ago the rebels beheaded nearly a dozen soldiers so the government sort of feels it can’t just let that go. Thus the current war.) We are told that the rebels may try to take it out on civilians so we should expect security will be tighter here too.

They took the unusual precaution of starting to check baggage on passenger ships now. For their efforts, the other day they found a guy bringing a sack of bananas and sweet potatoes on a ship travelling to the capital. And deep inside the sack was also a grenade and another explosive. It’s part of the local culture to bring a gift, especially food, for those you are visiting or for those at home when you return from a trip. But not usual at all to bring them explosives.

Bus bombings in the rural areas occur all too often as well. A couple of weeks ago a local pastor was killed when a bomb went off in some baggage at a bus terminal. He was standing near the pile of bags waiting for his wife to return from the ladies’ room.

Two other bombs were found and defused this past week. Some of these bombings are thought to be related to extortionists who plant bombs in buses when their demands aren’t met. Only explosives experts can tell extortionist bombings apart from rebel retaliation bombings. For the dead and injured, it’s all the same. Passengers are mostly gratified to now have their bags checked before being allowed to load them on the bus.

Things I do not understand

There are some things I still do not understand.

Today I got a series of frantic text messages from the second of my worlds about Sina. Sina is semi paralyzed. 30 years ago she was playing Tarzan and fell off of a jungle swing and damaged her spine. She recovered to the point of being able to get around with two long sticks. But in recent years her legs have gotten weaker and she has more difficulty walking at all. She’s really into warm water compresses, pehaps it makes her legs feel better or maybe she feels it will have some healing powers. But since her legs have gotten weaker, she also has less sensation in her feet. She has burned herself several times with water that was too hot. Last year she burned her feet and decided to treat the foot with local herbs to make it heal faster. So she applied the herbs and wrapped the foot in plastic for several days. I ended up treating her for the beginnings of gangrene in the tips of two toes. Thankfully after two courses of Cipro, ands lots of exposure to the air they did eventually heal. (I don’t think you want to hear about the smell!!)

Well, it seems she has once again burned her feet. Although by now she has a lot of experience with how long it takes for burns to heal, she wanted it to happen faster. So she allowed somebody to come and try a “new treatment” on her: one liter of salt mixed with 1 liter of kerosene plus the equivalent of a liter-sized chunk of ice. They soaked her feet in it. They said at first her feet got hard like ice and then after the ice melted they swelled and blistered. So now her state is MUCH worse than at first and she is in a lot of pain. So they are texting me asking what to do.

Why, oh why would they do such a thing??!!! Did they think “magic” would somehow offset the innate characteristics of the ingredients??? Normal skin would blister with such treatment, how much more burned skin!!! My friend here says maybe it’s because they didn’t go to school. But I don’t recall ever having any teacher telling us not to soak our feet in ice, kerosene and salt, do you?

Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere about trying to force things along faster than they’re meant to go?

What is normal?

I was writing to a friend who is in the US for a couple of months and told her things seem normal here. But what’s normal?

Normal here means that you expect to have your bag checked every time you go to the grocery store, the hospital, malls or any biggish store. When things are “tense” you might even get a pat down at the malls. You can expect as many as four searches (two x-ray and sometimes up to two hand searches of bags) at the airport not including the security check of the car you arrive in.

Normal also means that if you should bother to look up the weather forcast on the internet it would invariably say 60% chance of rain and thunderstorms. I am not actually sure what that means. It certainly doesn’t rain 60% (14.4 hours) of the day. But it does rain on far more than 219 days (60%) in the year. In fact it typically rains for at least a short while almost every day. So, I am not quite sure what exactly it means to say that there is a 60% chance of rain.

Normal means you can spend a fair amount of time standing in lines at ATM machines because most things are still paid for in cash. Some big stores take credit cards but since the system is off-line so often, it is usually much faster to pay cash. You also spend a fair amount of time standing in lines to pay utilities. They do not have a system for mailing checks or automatic deductions, but the telephone company does have a cool touch screen machine you can use if you pay by check.

Normal means that the rich have body guards – even when they go to the dentist.

Normal means that aside from the school year, you keep track of the passage of time by what fruits are in season.

Normal means that your doctor keeps your medical record on index cards. Normal means that you can get lab work and most tests done today, or tomorrow at the latest, and you can pick up the results the same day or the next.

Normal means that traffic flows better without traffic cops.

Normal means that at least one of your neighbors raises roosters for cock fighting. (So you never need an alarm clock.)

Normal means that somebody in the general neigborhood is having a party with BIG speakers on any given evening, though a recent city ordinence has limited most of it to before 10pm on school nights.

And normal means that it is not smart to use illegal drugs in this town. Killings of drug users and pushers still occur weekly by mysterious perpetrators.