the sweat team

Several of the hospital staff named ourselves the sweat team today.  It's generally descriptive of our current job onboard ship, and also our personal appearances most of the waking day.

At 0800 every morning we hop on the "shuttle" - a 13-15 passenger van - for a 2 hour trip that feels more like a rollercoaster ride.  The hills of Kwa-Zulu Natal are beautiful, all sharp angles and odd ridges and flatness, topped with a generous dusting of long grass and scattered round huts, rows of palms, odd-shaped evergreen, and what look like grown-up bonsai trees wiggling around in contours to a little tuft of leaves at the top.  Every night we ride home covered in grime and chemicals, sweat cooling into a sticky film in the breeze.

Our sweet ship is riding high in port, aft gangway in place and surrounded by pipes and landrovers on the dock.  Our job is simply to clean.  To clean and dust and scrub and dance with praise music blasting, and sort through mildewed supplies and equipment to clean anything even remotely salvageable, and then clean it again when we set up the hospital in Sierra Leone.  Because our ship has been at rest for the last few months...and now it's time to turn it back into a hospital, and a village.  And let me tell you, there's no one that cleans like nurses!  We're stripping and waxing the hospital floors again too, something we did last year when we arrived in Togo.  But this year we need to get everything possible done before we sail...because we'll be hitting the ground running.

I haven't taken many pictures, because I would rather not get my camera covered in dirt and sweat and wax and floor stripper.  But I'm sure there will be plenty of photo ops to come!