Snot and Stuff....

*Cultural differences can be so huge sometimes.... Recently a group of Indonesians travelled with some Americans from Jakarta to here. While on the plane, one of the Americans blew her nose into a tissue. Very polite by our cultural norms but all her Indonesian seatmates were horrified. Why is she saving her snot???? What is culturally appropriate here? Well... When the need to expel some snot arises, you take a deep breath, use your finger to close one nostril and then expel all the pent up air through the unblocked nostril, hopefully also expelling any offensive contents of said nostril. Of course it is a good idea to aim for a gutter or a patch of grass where the expelled contents won't really be visible because if you can't see it, it isn't there. And of course, if you practice this technique from the time you are a wee tot until adult-hood, you get really good at it. I have in fact seen well-dressed women apply this technique and the effect was rather disconcerting to say the least...
*Marc is doing pretty good. Malaria can by rather cyclical. So he'll feel good for a while and being a four year old will figure, great, now I can play!! And then he'll crash and have a bad headache again and we'll give him some more tylenol. He is keeping the quinine down which is great.
*Poor Ritha. She has a tooth that has abscessed a few times and it actually needs a root canal or be extracted. Unfortunately no dentists here can do root canals. So that leaves Ritha with only one option; pull the tooth. The other unfortunate thing is that it is one of her two front teeth. Thankfully there is an expat dentist here (he is training Papuans in dentistry) who can make plates with false teeth. He is actually making one for Ice as she is missing a lot of her molars and really can't eat things that need to be chewed. No, this dentist is not able to do root canals (not sure why...).
*Tonight Christiaan came to me and said that there was a sound bothering him and it was high pitched. He said this to me after having already gone to bed and removed his hearing aids. The cicadas (sp?) here are so loud that he can hear them without his hearing aids! So we stuffed some cotton into his ears and that helped...
*Only one and a half more weeks and the kids start school again! Yikes, I'm not ready for the grind of the school year yet!!!!