I 'spose a SCAR is a pretty decent souvenir.

Last night, I fell in a ditch.

All pain aside, falling in a ditch in Yaoundé is just about the most vile thing that could ever happen to someone. Cement ditches are the only infrastucture that's consistent in this town: there's one on each side of every street. They contain not only trash, but rotting food, and--I wish I were exaggerating--raw sewage.

Street lights are sporadic at best, but it never occurred to me that, security aside, there's a very practical reason not to go out at night, which is that you can't see the ditches you may fall into.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I fell head-first into a cement ditch about three feet deep and two feet wide. My head hit the opposite side, but my shoulder caught most of my weight, and my legs were splayed over the top. Thank G-d no one saw me--a white girl in a ditch would have been instant laughingstock of the nation.

I picked myself up quickly, appalled at how utterly disgusting the situation was. I lost a flip-flop and couldn't be bothered to look for it, so I walked home, one half of me covered in mud/sewage and one shoe missing.

Of course I had to pass by a bar full of men who no doubt wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

When I reached my house, I immediately jumped in the shower with my clothes on. Only then did I realize that Iwas bleeding profusely from my left knee.

After using nearly an entire bar of Dial soap on myself, I santized my knee and realized that the cut was deep. And wide. My host mother had left town that morning, so I called Teku, the progam director, who immediately came over with his wife to take me to the hospial.

A Cameroonian hospital, suffice it to say, would be condemned in the U.S. Supplies are few, the rooms simple and not very clean.

It was particulary unsettling to hear the nurse yell at her assitant that the tools weren't sanitary. (And uncomfortable, because I wonder if they bother to sanitize them for Cameroonian patients.)

The nurse gave me a shot that was supposedly anaesthetic, but apparently African anaesthetics don't work, because the stitches hurt like bananas and I wimpered like a little baby. She asked why I was crying, and I don't know how to sass well-enough in French to say, Fuck you. I'm getting stitches; I'll cry if I want to.

Today I looked at them, and I've watched enough Grey's Anatomy to think that I wasn't sutured correctly...

Also, everything hurts, especially the bump on my head.

But whatever, I'll have a sweet scar and not a bad story to go with it. I wasn't a very accident-prone kid--never broke anything or needed so much as a stitch--so how perfectly appropriate is it that last night, in Africa, of all places, I needed medical attetion for the first time in my life?