A visit to the Health Department

Yesterday, oh how long ago that seems, Laura and I took the five to the Health Department for vaccinations.  Regular pediatricians apparently are booked until sometime in mid next century but the health department was available for back to back appointments, so off we went.

Though I did not meet the nurse, who apparently was quite kind, she was obviously according to Laura was  not working on production, and did have quite the load of paper work to properly document, certify, legitify, duplicate, replicate, multiplcate, and so on with paper.  In fact at some point during the morning, the long morning — we were there from nine till almost noon— that is nearly three hours folks— count em— Laura went back to help with the paper work to coordinate existing records from abroad with needed vaccinations per child.  

and that left me with Ta - Da — Five kids, a waiting room and a hall way.

 Well, we did foot races in the hall way — timed of course by Julianna and me.  Fortunately no one bumped into one another and subsequently cried, ( I was worried about this potentiality)  I did not photograph the races.  I did photo the kids interacting with other board kids in the women's health waiting room.  At this point we are ranging far and wide.

Back in our native land, the vaccination central, do not be deceived by the apparent calm as presented by young John Paul, who by the way is avoiding the needle this day as he is awaiting a visit to UNC Children's Hospital for tubes to be put into his ears scheduled for Friday.  He was reading publications of avoiding AIDS, or checking on bus schedules.  He did unload both racks of folders several times.

I was somewhat loose with what passed for acceptable behavior (sorry about that Laura) as it was a very long morning and the trip to the snack bar - oh yeah juice bottles for us all and Oreo's (praise be) only lasted so long

Little was unexplored in the office, a door stopper, was actually removed — undocumented though

and my favorite photo — gosh I love this photo — it shows, not one but two types of Arab women, a Burmese man sleeping (later I enjoyed talking with him) some kids jointly playing with an iPad, one watching Sesame, or something like that on a TV with extremely low volume and poor reception, and the back of the mother of the littlest girl and her older sister who were from the Middle east (Iraq or Syria?)

As far as I could tell we were the only west Europeans in the building.  A regular United Nations was meeting on that floor.  Isaac told me he heard people speaking Chinese, a Vietnamese family was there when we arrived, and after we had been there a while a Karen Hill Tribe Family from the mountains of Thailand came in.  The grandmother was dressed like she had just come down the mountain too.  Looked very much like the many of the refugees from the Vietnam War the fled the mountains of Laos that Patt and I worked with after we left the Peace Corps back in 1976.  

Like I said we were there a long time.  We did - or rather the kids did get the shots though and thrown in with the wait was a little comforting time — or enjoying basking of a little boasting time whatever the case may be depending on how the time "in the back "there" went.  The number of stickers in possession was a clue too.