Cow, Chinchulin, Clinic, and a Close Call

What a day! I'll start with the cow that used to live outside our front door....

He got mixed up with the bad crowd of dogs that live behind our house. Apparently the Doberman got loose and scared the cow right into a poll where he broke his neck. The owners had to then kill the cow and get it's meat (this is definitely bad news for the owners, because it was a Hollandes cow which gives about 25 liters of milk a day! very valuable!). For those of you farmers out there, a huge slab of bloody, bloody meet being wheelbarrowed across your yard isn't that big of a deal. Pretty disgustingly fascinating for me though. Then i got to see its lungs hanging over the fence. Then, I got to see the Paraguayan delicacy, "Chinchulin" being prepared. Those with queasy stomachs.. please skip to paragraph 2. "Grandma! You have cow poop all over your hands! That's gross!" said a little boy. I agree. She told them she was cleaning the chinchulin, which is apparently delicious! (I'll take their word for it, thank you very much.) She was methodically squishing the green poop out of the cow's intestines, and saving the intestines (chinchulin) for a nice treat. I don't have a picture for you... but picture lots of sausages strung together, and squeezing out the mushy insides of the sausages... 

Gross stuff over! You can read again! On to the "clinic" part of today's post. We arrived at our first school of the afternoon, and after we had unloaded the truck and were preparing our stage, the school principal told Benji that they had an emergency. A girl had collapsed on the stairs, was unconscious and needed to be taken to the nearest medical facility. We all carried her, trying to wake her up as we climbed up into the bed of the truck. I sat in the back of the pickup with her and another teacher, and she did wake up enroute. We don't really know the cause of this attack, but it could stem from an overdose on pain medication that she may have taken just prior to coming to school. We're so thankful that we happened to be at that school right when she needed to be taken out for medical care. The only other vehicle at the school was a motorcycle, which would NOT be able to transport an unconscious teenager. Thank You Lord!

The "Close Call" was my run-in with a fan. Remember me mentioning that ceiling fans are basically helicopter propellers when they're set to their highest setting? Anything that's not properly secured flies away.... Well, during our rendition of the Good Samaritan, I become a vulture for about 2 seconds when I stand on a chair and flap my arms, looking like I want to devour the dying man in the story. Today, we happened to be inside a classroom, directly under a fan. When I stood on the chair and started to flap my arms, my hand hit the fan. My hand was fine, the fan was fine and I laughed (along with all the kids who saw the vulture hit her hand). Later, I found out that the fan was on the highest setting, and it's actually really really powerful. I must have hit my hand exactly at the right place on the fan so that it didn't break any bones or cut me at all! The principal told me that an angel must have pushed my hand right out of danger.

cows, clinics and a close call...