Women's Hospital, the Wedding, the Brothel, and The Bet

I forgot to mention this earlier, but they have giant bats here. Like, bigger than any crow at home. We saw one fly over the other day and I asked Lisette if she thought he was off to fight crime. In another joke she didn't get, we were talking about how the Netherlands is below sea level and she asked if any other countries were. I told her only Atlantis.

I'm going to start today with stories from the women's hospital. They will be graphic.
Ketumathie was a mansion that was donated by the owners as a hospital. It's really nice and pretty much better than Base Hospital in every way. What I do is pretty unorganized so it's kinda random (I sat in the neo-natal care ward for an hour waiting for someone who never came.) But I've been spending lots of time in the labor room:

You walk into a room that's lit, but not bright. Seven beds lay in front of you, each holding a woman. As you bat the flies away from your head, you're greeted by someone wearing a rubber apron and bloody gloves. You hear screaming from all sides. Immediately to your right there is a woman with her legs spread apart and blood covering her genitals. The next bed over the woman is screaming as three people are yelling at her and pushing on her stomach. A head emerges and then the rest of a pale creature, still attached by a cord. Even though the mother has stooped screaming, the child takes over with screams of his own. As the baby is taken away, the mother is still bleeding. Mere feet away, the woman next to her just witnessed the fate that would be hers in a few short minutes.

That narrative aside, the labor room isn't much different. There are seven beds and there were 3 births within an hour on Friday. There's a lot of blood and I can't help imagining that most of my cheerleader friends will never have normal childbirths. There has been tearing in every one I've seen. They actually usually cut the tear so it's at least controlled. The actual birth is surprisingly non-bloody. The baby is whiteish and screams a lot. On Friday, after the birth, the doctor that delivered cut the umbilical cord and then ran, actually ran, across the labor room to this little emergency table while holding a 3 second old baby. Many nurses rushed over and a man wearing jeans even came into the room to give his expertise. (I'm guessing he was one of the senior doctors.) The baby wasn't breathing and his heart wasn't beating normally. They fixed the problems, so the baby is fine, but it was kinda tense for a little bit. They do actually wear gloves in this hospital because you kinda have to, so that's good. I also work with a doctor doing charting for him. We saw 50 babies in an hour and 45 minutes. I pretty much wrote as fast as I could the whole time.

A little backstory: We usually go out on weekends and drink. I kinda get tired and fall asleep at times in bars. They even made of game of stacking stuff on me and whoever woke me up lost. I even provide entertainment while sleeping. Anyway, I've gotten a reputation for falling asleep, so they decided to take bets on when I'll fall asleep on the day of the wedding. They drew times in half hour intervals out of a hat (actually a camera case, but who's keeping track?) starting at 7pm and going until 4:30am. It was a 50 rupee (50 cent) buy in. I was a player as well because if I stayed up until 5am, I won the money. Read on for the results.
The wedding of one of the worker's sister was this weekend and all the volunteers were invited. We all dressed in saris and sarongs, which made for some fun pictures. (I'll get them from people later.) The wedding was actually Catholic and the Mass was all in Sinhala, but I managed to know at least what was going on. None of the Europeans are religious, it's kinda weird. The reception had some Sri Lankan dancers and every table had a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. There was free beer and good food. We started drinking around 1. Every time I looked away or left, they spiked my beer or drink with whiskey. Actually, they did this while I was holding my drink and looking right at them, too. I took it all in stride. We ended up being one of the last groups to leave the place at like 4. It was really tame and almost disappointing, but still fun. After the wedding we had a 2 hour drive back to Colombo, which was going to be my first real challenge in the bet. But, I made sure that if I can't sleep, nobody can. I ended up thinking of teaching the Europeans mafia, which was a lot of fun and kept me awake. We went to an English pub when we got back and ate and drank more beer. We pretty much drank for another 4 hours. Every half hour after 7 I made a tally on my arm for beating a time. I had to make it to 20 tallies. The pub closed early, so we went to this club that was kinda crappy. A group of us just wanted to have a beer and chill as opposed to dance, so we went searching for another pub. On our way we chatted with the guys working at Pizza Hut because they have to know where a pub is. They actually got the manager to direct us to a bar: the Winter Palace. We walk down the road and find the place. They wanted a cover, and we didn't want to pay, so we left, but they came after us and told us we didn't have to pay. Everyone loves white people. This also turned out to be a dance club, but we were like, whatever. So we're stitting there chatting and Sam says, "I bet that woman is a prostitute." I look and laugh and agree. Then we look around some more. There are older men in suits and all the girls look like prostitutes. There are no other girls in the club except the ones we brought. "There's no way this is a brothel." So we're sitting there drinking and notice that people keep coming and going out of this set of doors. Now we're intrigued. So two of the girls ask what's back there and it turns out to be the bathrooms. Bathrooms with lockers full of lingerie. That pretty much confirmed the brothel hypothesis. We decided not to talk to any of the women, no matter how hilarious it would have been because we didn't want to have them think the wrong thing. There was one other white guy in his late 20's there dancing with this girl who could not have been older than 15. She was very likely 14. He looked over at us and got a really guilty look on his face. We left after about an hour. I've now had a drink at a Sri Lankan brothel.

We get back to the 'hotel' about 2:30am. I have 2 and a half hour left to stay awake, as I haven't fallen asleep yet. Pretty much everyone crashes right away, but thankfully I stayed up talking to Jackie for a while. After she fell asleep I had about an hour and a half. I have one hour left. I'm in a room that looks like a set for the 4th Saw movie. It's dark. I'm in Sri Lanka. It's 4am. There are noises outside. I can't help but think of every scary movie I've seen. Jackie sleeping in the room is not helping because I swear she's going to open her eyes and they're going to be white and she's going to start talking in a demonic voice. I managed to keep my mind off of the many ways I could die long enough to get to 5am. I was the only one of our group to stay up till 5am. VICTORIOUS!

I made a reference to The Karate Kid to all the Europeans who just stared at me. I said, "Nevermind, I'll just be over here singing the Star Spangled Banner..."

Sorry about this mammoth post, but I had lots to tell. (I know I should have used that joke for the elephant post, but I only thought of it now.) I hope Halloween weekend was fun back in Madison. Post more comments, they make me happy.

Kurt