Add aspiring vet and electrician to my resume

I would like to add another bullet to the list of reasons I do not want children:

• the potential of a prolapsed uterus

This week I was visiting a friend in a neighboring community when her uncle came running in talking about a cow being sick. She had just given birth about an hour and a half earlier and the birth seemed to proceed normally but it was the cow´s fourth calf. I went with all of the people going to see the cow and found it in immense pain with what appeared to me to be a prolapsed uterus. I called Mom to get a quick step by step about what to do (really quick, we were only on the phone for about 2 min) and did my best to help out. The local vet was out of town so I knew that the information I had gathered from my mom plus the experience of the farmers was what we would have to go on.

I hadn´t realized it before, but a cow´s uterus is really big and heavy so we got the cow down on the ground so she wouldn´t move as much and so we could work with the uterus better. At Mom´s direction, we spread two kilos of sugar over the uterus to shrink it by osmosis, making it easier to work back in. After the sugar had absorbed as much water as it could we washed off the uterus with water, ¨scrubbed in¨as much as we could, and started forcing the uterus back in. I had the longest arms of anyone there so I was the one actually pushing in the last parts until it was in place. We took shifts that night watching the cow to make sure she didn´t prolapse again and everything went fine. It has been several days now and both the cow and the mother appear to be healthy. As a result of the incident I was able to talk the family into buying balanced cow feed and will be getting some free milk!!! Cows here serve more or less as campesino´s banks and I was very pleased that I could do anything to help them with this unfortunate event.

On a less dramatic note, another accomplishment of mine this week was replacing an electrical outlet by myself. When my family was visiting one of my (two) outlets got fried from plugging too many things into it. I had asked several electricians to come to my house and replace it for me when I finally gave up and bought the outlet myself. Looking at the back of the outlet I figure I would be able to figure out how to wire it if I saw how the old one was wired. I bought a multimeter so I could make sure my electricity actually switched off when I flipped the switch on my box and called my neighbor over so that he could call the ambulance if I messed up. The hardest part of the whole process was that two of the screws on the old outlet were threaded backwards and it took me a couple of minutes to figure that out!

I had an actual agroforestry related meeting scheduled this week (to talk about starting tree nurseries) but that got put off due to rain! Regardless it was still a productive week!