The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency
This incredibly popular book series is set in Botswana, specifically Gaborone and Molepolole! I'm reading the first book in the series while I am here now, and it's been so much fun to recognize important places in the book as places I have now visited, such as Kgale Hill, or Airport Junction Mall. This week we had a couple of mysteries to solve, so we took over for Mma Ramotswe as the ladies of the agency.
The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency had a real humdinger this week! There were actually two cases. In the first, our attending accidentally picked up someone else's phone but couldn't figure out who to give it back to, got impatient when the first person to call it was not helpful in finding the owner's identity, and happily let me take over the mystery. Solved within 10 minutes. The owner called back, and when they finally spoke in English instead of Setswana, I set up a rendez-vous and returned the phone. Boom. Mystery solved.
That brings us to the much greater mystery: The Great Banana Caper. A guest blogger, Adrienne Carey, tells us the tale:
Jackie and I bought two bunches of bananas on Wednesday night for breakfast for the next week. We have a basket for fruit on the counter and put everything in there. We also bought some "soft citrus" which turns out is related to tangerines but comes from Asia. Anyway, we came home from work yesterday and for some reason, I immediately saw that the bananas were missing. "Hmm, I thought. Did Shumi, the house cleaner, come by today?" I asked Jackie and Teju [our ob/gyn roommate]. No, that wouldn't make any sense. She comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Inspecting the area around the basket more closely, the soft citrus was still present but there were two little brown things on the counter. "Is that poop?" Jackie asked. I smelled it. Smelled like poop to me. Hmm. Okay. More details. Looking around more, there was no evidence that anything else was disturbed or moved. I looked in the garbage; bananas nor traces of banana peels were present. Shumi sometimes throws away old food when she comes so maybe she did that? Again, it's not Tuesday or Thursday so why would she come by the house? And if anything, the bananas were green when we bought them so they were no where near being old and needing to be thrown out. That leads us back to the suspicious poop stains on the counter. "Monkeys?" Jackie and I looked at each other. No, there is no way. We hadn't opened any windows in the house except for the window on the second story in the bathroom. And we always lock it. Jackie ran upstairs. Sure enough. Locked. No signs that monkeys came through the window; all the shampoo bottles on the ledge were undisturbed.
Continuing to puzzle over what could have happened to the bananas and also caused the poop stains, monkeys seemed like the most logical choice but also ridiculous because how could they have gotten in? We all decided we should text Janet Gaborone, the impeccable and omnipresent administrative assistant for our program... we sent her a message through What'sApp? as follows..."Hey Janet! We just got home and some our food is missing. All of our bananas are gone. Do you know if Shumi was here today, or were you here today? Nothing else looks messed up and the front door was locked."
Cleaning up the supposed poop stains with "Mr. Muscle" neon pink cleaning spray and some toilet paper, we headed off to dinner at a wonderful Indian restaurant called Chutney and didn't hear back from Janet until we returned from dinner. Janet's reply was waiting when we walked through the door. "Hey just saw your message, i was there but at Connie's house only popped in and collected the envelope didn't even look around..was any window open..there were so many monkeys today by the house." AHA! So monkeys could be an option! But again, how did they get in? I reassured Janet that we were not worried or upset but just puzzled by the lack of our breakfast fruit of choice. Janet replied..."Yeah its weird..thank for understanding though..its kind of a mystery..😳 looks like someone or something was hungry...do have some fun (this weekend)." I then mentioned the streaks of poop on the counter and it sent Janet into a texting frenzy. The emojis were flying. Laughing faces, flames, "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys, poop swirls. I had set something in motion by mentioning the poop stains and the hilarity ensued. Janet said she was "laughing like an idiot" and that the man sitting next to her on the bus (she is traveling to Francistown to attend a friend's wedding) asked her what was so funny. She told him the story, and he started to laugh. The great banana caper was spreading like wild fire through the Kalahari desert night. The best we could come up with for an explanation was that Janet entered the house, walked in, left the door open for a split second, a monkey ran in behind her (one group of residents left the windows open in the kitchen once and monkeys came in and took EVERYTHING while they were at work), sprinted around the corner and into the kitchen, leapt up onto the counter, set its little poopy bum down on the counter while it grabbed the two bunches of bananas and then bolted for the door before Janet could turn around. Plausible? Possible. We all wish we could be a fly on the wall to actually witness what really happened. We are still waiting for confirmation from Shumi that she just didn't come over and take them. But, secretly, we all hope that it was the monkeys that did it. I mean, how cliche can you get? Monkeys love bananas. 💩🙉🙈🙊💩
--Adrienne
Haha, monkeys stealing bananas, classic case. I also frantically checked all the rooms in the house to make sure a renegade monkey was not hiding out somewhere. Nope, no hiding monkeys. Janet also texted me that she was going to come back and kill the monkeys because they'd never repay us the bananas haha.
What What:
There are some amazing phrases in Setswana and Botswanan English. We have honestly not learned a lot of Setswana because it is very difficult, and we almost never see it in writing, only hear it. We have at least learned the standard greeting, "dumela," which you then follow by Mma (woman) or Rra (man) depending on who you are greeting. People greet us with the phrase "dumela mma" all the time, and they seem to appreciate when we use this greeting, as well. When I was first reading The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and saw the character "Mma Ramotswe" written out, I had thought Mma was maybe a shortening of "mama," or "madame" but now I know it is like both "mrs and miss," and the way you say "mma" includes an exaggerated "mm" sound. Similarly, for Rra, you roll the R, as you do with most R's here. To agree with someone you say either "emma," or "erra," which I delightedly did while ordering pizza over the phone.
There are some other phrases that I truly love. First and foremost, "no matata," meaning "no problem." We use it all the time. Or, as one nurse pointed out our psychotic patient the other day, "matata in the head." I also love the phrase "now now." In Botswana, there does not seem to be a great deal of hurry. Even in the hospital, things just do not move at the speed at which I am used to certainly, but even the speed at which they sometimes truly need to move in an emergency. Hakuna matata. In Botswana, if you truly want something to be done quickly, it is best to emphasize by asking for something not now, but now-now. "Now" seems like it could mean anywhere from within an hour to a day. "Now now" seems to mean within 30 minutes. It seems like they might be missing the phrase "now now now," which might mean "run and do this immediately." Lastly, the final phrase I will share is "what what." These words come at the end of a list and mean, "et cetera." Example used in a sentence: there are so many things we could do this weekend: bike ride, go on safari, take pictures, what what.
Another Week at the Hospital:
We had a pretty good week at the hospital. We know how things work now, for the most part, and we have friends there, especially the medical officers and interns on our ward. This past week, I was assigned my Quality Improvement week, meaning I was given a project to work on instead of directly working on the wards. I worked in the office with the program's research assistant inputting and (my job specifically) correcting/summarizing data about patients' diagnoses on hospital discharge. The research assistant is good at her job, but she has no clinical training, so was unable to draw conclusions about patients' diagnoses. It was sometimes not the most exciting project, but it was pretty interesting to learn a bit about why people get hospitalized here. The biggest reasons, from my non-scientific counting in my head: TB (pneumonia or extra-pulmonary TB, often in the setting of HIV), bacterial pneumonia, gastroenteritis, heart failure, chronic lung disease exacerbation, meningitis. There were more suicide attempts than I would have initially guessed. Adrienne took care of a girl this week who drank paraffin (i.e. kerosene) because she was being abused at home. She is doing fine now, but it's a really sad situation, not sure what social services are like here. There is also a fair amount of stroke, diabetes, and uncontrolled hypertension. Not many heart attacks, which is weird because we do see strokes, but maybe that gets diagnosed as something else, or those patients go to the surgical ward? I'll have to ask about that.
This week I also remained in charge of the TB ward, which is thankfully very quiet. It had a range of 1-2 patients while I was there. Some patients who are diagnosed with TB can be treated as an outpatient if they are not very sick, but others who are sick remain in the ward until their sputum is no longer positive for AFB (test for TB on microscope). There is a robust TB monitoring system for outpatients with direct-observed therapy in patients' communities. It's quite good.
Adrienne and I are going to get ready for a weekend spent at Madikwe, a nearby game reserve in South Africa! I'm sure I'll have many pictures and stories to post at the end of our stay!
This incredibly popular book series is set in Botswana, specifically Gaborone and Molepolole! I'm reading the first book in the series while I am here now, and it's been so much fun to recognize important places in the book as places I have now visited, such as Kgale Hill, or Airport Junction Mall. This week we had a couple of mysteries to solve, so we took over for Mma Ramotswe as the ladies of the agency.
The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency had a real humdinger this week! There were actually two cases. In the first, our attending accidentally picked up someone else's phone but couldn't figure out who to give it back to, got impatient when the first person to call it was not helpful in finding the owner's identity, and happily let me take over the mystery. Solved within 10 minutes. The owner called back, and when they finally spoke in English instead of Setswana, I set up a rendez-vous and returned the phone. Boom. Mystery solved.
That brings us to the much greater mystery: The Great Banana Caper. A guest blogger, Adrienne Carey, tells us the tale:
Jackie and I bought two bunches of bananas on Wednesday night for breakfast for the next week. We have a basket for fruit on the counter and put everything in there. We also bought some "soft citrus" which turns out is related to tangerines but comes from Asia. Anyway, we came home from work yesterday and for some reason, I immediately saw that the bananas were missing. "Hmm, I thought. Did Shumi, the house cleaner, come by today?" I asked Jackie and Teju [our ob/gyn roommate]. No, that wouldn't make any sense. She comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Inspecting the area around the basket more closely, the soft citrus was still present but there were two little brown things on the counter. "Is that poop?" Jackie asked. I smelled it. Smelled like poop to me. Hmm. Okay. More details. Looking around more, there was no evidence that anything else was disturbed or moved. I looked in the garbage; bananas nor traces of banana peels were present. Shumi sometimes throws away old food when she comes so maybe she did that? Again, it's not Tuesday or Thursday so why would she come by the house? And if anything, the bananas were green when we bought them so they were no where near being old and needing to be thrown out. That leads us back to the suspicious poop stains on the counter. "Monkeys?" Jackie and I looked at each other. No, there is no way. We hadn't opened any windows in the house except for the window on the second story in the bathroom. And we always lock it. Jackie ran upstairs. Sure enough. Locked. No signs that monkeys came through the window; all the shampoo bottles on the ledge were undisturbed.
Continuing to puzzle over what could have happened to the bananas and also caused the poop stains, monkeys seemed like the most logical choice but also ridiculous because how could they have gotten in? We all decided we should text Janet Gaborone, the impeccable and omnipresent administrative assistant for our program... we sent her a message through What'sApp? as follows..."Hey Janet! We just got home and some our food is missing. All of our bananas are gone. Do you know if Shumi was here today, or were you here today? Nothing else looks messed up and the front door was locked."
Cleaning up the supposed poop stains with "Mr. Muscle" neon pink cleaning spray and some toilet paper, we headed off to dinner at a wonderful Indian restaurant called Chutney and didn't hear back from Janet until we returned from dinner. Janet's reply was waiting when we walked through the door. "Hey just saw your message, i was there but at Connie's house only popped in and collected the envelope didn't even look around..was any window open..there were so many monkeys today by the house." AHA! So monkeys could be an option! But again, how did they get in? I reassured Janet that we were not worried or upset but just puzzled by the lack of our breakfast fruit of choice. Janet replied..."Yeah its weird..thank for understanding though..its kind of a mystery..😳 looks like someone or something was hungry...do have some fun (this weekend)." I then mentioned the streaks of poop on the counter and it sent Janet into a texting frenzy. The emojis were flying. Laughing faces, flames, "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys, poop swirls. I had set something in motion by mentioning the poop stains and the hilarity ensued. Janet said she was "laughing like an idiot" and that the man sitting next to her on the bus (she is traveling to Francistown to attend a friend's wedding) asked her what was so funny. She told him the story, and he started to laugh. The great banana caper was spreading like wild fire through the Kalahari desert night. The best we could come up with for an explanation was that Janet entered the house, walked in, left the door open for a split second, a monkey ran in behind her (one group of residents left the windows open in the kitchen once and monkeys came in and took EVERYTHING while they were at work), sprinted around the corner and into the kitchen, leapt up onto the counter, set its little poopy bum down on the counter while it grabbed the two bunches of bananas and then bolted for the door before Janet could turn around. Plausible? Possible. We all wish we could be a fly on the wall to actually witness what really happened. We are still waiting for confirmation from Shumi that she just didn't come over and take them. But, secretly, we all hope that it was the monkeys that did it. I mean, how cliche can you get? Monkeys love bananas. 💩🙉🙈🙊💩
--Adrienne
Haha, monkeys stealing bananas, classic case. I also frantically checked all the rooms in the house to make sure a renegade monkey was not hiding out somewhere. Nope, no hiding monkeys. Janet also texted me that she was going to come back and kill the monkeys because they'd never repay us the bananas haha.
What What:
There are some amazing phrases in Setswana and Botswanan English. We have honestly not learned a lot of Setswana because it is very difficult, and we almost never see it in writing, only hear it. We have at least learned the standard greeting, "dumela," which you then follow by Mma (woman) or Rra (man) depending on who you are greeting. People greet us with the phrase "dumela mma" all the time, and they seem to appreciate when we use this greeting, as well. When I was first reading The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and saw the character "Mma Ramotswe" written out, I had thought Mma was maybe a shortening of "mama," or "madame" but now I know it is like both "mrs and miss," and the way you say "mma" includes an exaggerated "mm" sound. Similarly, for Rra, you roll the R, as you do with most R's here. To agree with someone you say either "emma," or "erra," which I delightedly did while ordering pizza over the phone.
There are some other phrases that I truly love. First and foremost, "no matata," meaning "no problem." We use it all the time. Or, as one nurse pointed out our psychotic patient the other day, "matata in the head." I also love the phrase "now now." In Botswana, there does not seem to be a great deal of hurry. Even in the hospital, things just do not move at the speed at which I am used to certainly, but even the speed at which they sometimes truly need to move in an emergency. Hakuna matata. In Botswana, if you truly want something to be done quickly, it is best to emphasize by asking for something not now, but now-now. "Now" seems like it could mean anywhere from within an hour to a day. "Now now" seems to mean within 30 minutes. It seems like they might be missing the phrase "now now now," which might mean "run and do this immediately." Lastly, the final phrase I will share is "what what." These words come at the end of a list and mean, "et cetera." Example used in a sentence: there are so many things we could do this weekend: bike ride, go on safari, take pictures, what what.
The old Scottish missionary church in Molepolole
We got treated to a rainbow on our ride home yesterday. For the most part, it is dry and hot, but we've gotten rain showers about once a week. This was a double rainbow that at one point stretched across the horizon.
Another Week at the Hospital:
We had a pretty good week at the hospital. We know how things work now, for the most part, and we have friends there, especially the medical officers and interns on our ward. This past week, I was assigned my Quality Improvement week, meaning I was given a project to work on instead of directly working on the wards. I worked in the office with the program's research assistant inputting and (my job specifically) correcting/summarizing data about patients' diagnoses on hospital discharge. The research assistant is good at her job, but she has no clinical training, so was unable to draw conclusions about patients' diagnoses. It was sometimes not the most exciting project, but it was pretty interesting to learn a bit about why people get hospitalized here. The biggest reasons, from my non-scientific counting in my head: TB (pneumonia or extra-pulmonary TB, often in the setting of HIV), bacterial pneumonia, gastroenteritis, heart failure, chronic lung disease exacerbation, meningitis. There were more suicide attempts than I would have initially guessed. Adrienne took care of a girl this week who drank paraffin (i.e. kerosene) because she was being abused at home. She is doing fine now, but it's a really sad situation, not sure what social services are like here. There is also a fair amount of stroke, diabetes, and uncontrolled hypertension. Not many heart attacks, which is weird because we do see strokes, but maybe that gets diagnosed as something else, or those patients go to the surgical ward? I'll have to ask about that.
This week I also remained in charge of the TB ward, which is thankfully very quiet. It had a range of 1-2 patients while I was there. Some patients who are diagnosed with TB can be treated as an outpatient if they are not very sick, but others who are sick remain in the ward until their sputum is no longer positive for AFB (test for TB on microscope). There is a robust TB monitoring system for outpatients with direct-observed therapy in patients' communities. It's quite good.
With Sampson! He's our local friend and our cab driver. He doesn't drive us to the hospital and back (the program has a hired driver especially for that task), but he drives us everywhere else if needed. His car could really use "Pimp My Ride," with Xzibit. Too bad they don't film in Botswana!
Adrienne and I are going to get ready for a weekend spent at Madikwe, a nearby game reserve in South Africa! I'm sure I'll have many pictures and stories to post at the end of our stay!
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