Under the Milky Way

I remember when I was a kid and I used to read this book called Thunder Cake. It was one of my favorite books about a young girl and her grandma watching a storm come in on a farm. The grandma would count the number of seconds between the lightning and thunder as she ran around putting animals in their pens, preparing for the rain, and gathering materials to bake a "thunder cake." Maybe it was this book that made me obsessed with sitting outside and anticipating a big rain. Since it's officially rainy season here, a big rain comes every few days, usually in the afternoon. And to me, there is absolutely nothing better than sitting, watching, listening, and waiting for those storms to roll in over the hills that surround our village.  The day usually begins with an unbearable, humid heat that makes you sweat uncontrollably and feel absolutely miserable. Then, just when it reaches a point when you don't think you can take it anymore and you resort to just s...

Y'all. I can't even begin to explain the high I'm on right now, but I'll try.  For the past 5-6 weeks,  our SOLID team and I have been preparing for a community-wide HIV testing and awareness event for World AIDS Day. This is a surprisingly large undertaking, and I'd be lying if I pretended that there were not some points in the past few weeks when I'd regretted having decided to try to put on this event. We called on and met with various groups around our health center's catchment area including HIV support groups, drama groups, students at the secondary school, and community based organizations to prepare the program. My primary counterpart and I may have been the head coordinators, but it was our dedicated SOLID team that really pulled through with the action side of things.  We had our final confirmatory meeting with all the groups on Sunday where we made sure that everyone knew what to expect. I used the money from my INCREDIBLE support system (...