It's rainy season again, and I forgot my umbrella

We're at the St. Francis Outreach clinic, the whole hospital staff, in the village known as Kayeleka. We're just waiting, or more simply as we say here, we're just staying until the food is prepared and the car returns.

We left for the clinic in a downpour. We ran the clinic in a downpour. And now we wait, it only makes sense that the rain would stop now. My shoes, a new pair of loafers are soaked through. My toes and heels feel clammy and cold. My linen pants, carefully concealed under my chitenje, damply cling to my calves.

At times like this I despise the rain. I despise the clammy morbid touch of my face, pliant and moist. I hate the squish of my shoes. A squishy sandwich as my heel digs in to the sponged leather and then further digging into the mollified sandy dirt. I hate how my cardigan dampens and becomes a stringy cloth sutured to my arms. Hate how my umbrella must become a permanent appendage. I hate that I have hardly any task today. In anticipating of the car being late on account of the rain, the volunteers went ahead and did my part of the clinic. Now, I'm walking aimlessly through the clinic, outdoors of course. With a few of the various parts housed in school blocks, dozens and dozens of people shoved in open air rooms. I wander form block to block looking for a task to entertain me and keep me from pondering my soaked galoshes and overall wet-dog appearance. Finally, Bright asks me to help with the feeding program for the underweight children. I entered the weights, jotted down their village and traditional authority, and measured the MUAC (mid upper arm circumference). I breezed through the recording, as I always tend to do with data entry. The numbers jump from my hand, pulsing through the pen, onto the paper in a motion so fluid you would think my arm was mechanized. As quickly as I entered the date, I was again through, just to sit again. To sit again in this rain, wet clothes plastered to me, only to wait until lunch is prepared and I can climb back into the ambulance to go back to Mhalaunda.