all in a days work

Yesterday we went on prenatal homevisits. Trecking thru the slums and eating halo-halo...drinking coke and skyflakes. Then visiting and gettting lectured on how old I am and that I have no baby or asawa (husband). Finally, we get home and it's my turn to cook so I pull out a curry mix. It is always abit daunting to cook for others. So I kinda figured that if I added alittle red chillies it would mask over any weird flavors or burnt taste....i didn't try the mix before i decided to throw in some chilli's though...I made the worlds hottest chilli curry.
My roomies were very forgiving and kept telling me that it was Okay though...no one wanted seconds.
At around 7pm it is time to go to Gerlene's (my midwifes house) and wait in case there is a birth.
Some one comes with their baby and asks Ger to administer antibiotic injections that have been prescribed by the doctor. It is much cheaper for the family to find a kindly midwife to help them out than to pay for a hospital fee and get the dr to administer the medications. The baby has an infection due to meconium asperation during labor. baby sofia was very brave thru it all, at only a week old she gets 2 shots a day! By 8pm i am ready for my evening entertainment. i have become addicted to the evening soaps here on philipino television. i cant understand much, but I think it's the melodrama and continuous emotional confrontation that soothes me. Watching someone else cry and moan about their wretched existence in a different language somehow appeals to me I guess.
Bed at 10pm...I can't watch soaps ALL nite! At 2 am I wake up and then my roomate really wakes up...she thinks there is a spider on her right now! If you knew my roomie-this is not a good thing! So i get up and check her sheets, her hair, her pillow...she jumps off the bed and van't be persuaded to get back on it. It looks like I am going to have to stay awake and watch for creepies with her, but then we get another little visitor, a cockroach crawling straight for my roomies feet. Thinking that this could be what puts her over the edge, I motion for her to get back on the bed...she, thinking it's a spider shows a speed uncharacteristic of someone half asleep, and goes back onto the offending bed. Meanwhile our Gerlene thinks that someone's at the door and we have caught a baby in midair! She laughs it off and goes back to bed and us white girls have to try to figure out how to get back to sleep.
i am tired, it would be nice to sleep, so i offer to sleep on the twin bed with her-against the open window which terrifies her so much. The more the merrier right? She calls it the 'crack'. So I am thinking what a great, brave person I am to sleep on the 'crack'. After about 5 seconds my euphoria wears off and I realize I am sleeping on the 'crack'!
So there we are, two average size white adult females, sleeping on the top bunk of a twin bed in one of the hottest climates in the world. But we aren't really thinking about that right then, we are just two girls trying to get thru a very dark nite with a 'crack', a very uncomfortable crack, a crack with a window. Really it is scarier than it sounds. I did go back to sleep, i did quote scripture, and then morning came. Somehow with a little light things can get alot better. maybe thats why our midwife sleeps with the light on...she knows what hides in the dark...