A Sunday

Today I washed the car. Not a big deal but to me it's a little like working in the garden or mowing the lawn....after you've done it you can look at it with a sense of accomplishment. Achievement in medicine is so often undefined and slow such that at the end of the day it is difficult to look back and assess what you have truly accomplished. Hence the seduction of washing the car.

No one in my skin or at my "station" washes their own vehicle here. It is viewed as beneath one. And it represents a chance for someone else to earn a token amount of money. Lynne and I actually got into a bit of an animated conversation about that; I was taking money away from someone else by washing my own vehicle. Nope I was simply trying to achieve where I had not in a more immediate time frame. I enjoyed it and the car is clean.

Things here are clean in general. There are no true heaps on the road, little if any litter as the govt employs people to cut grass, sweep streets, scavenge litter, and in general keep the place neat and tidy. In Sudan the litter was so ever present that I was surprised to see it in the pictures I took, so used to it was I.

A quiet Sunday beginning with a great birding adventure at the local game reserve where we saw at least 20 different and exotic species, wart hogs, impala, and huge monitor lizards basking in the sun on a pond bank near their nests. Then a fat breakfast, now a nap. Hardly the rough life to be sure. Difficult to reconcile that at times but the occasional car wash helps if only temporarily.