Yunnan Baiyao

I am DONE! DONE that wretched, I mean... challenging... paper! And DONE my first semester of midwifery! Done with that little stress bubble that had built up in my chest in the past week. :) Now I'm just preparing for my departure to Haiti on Sunday and drinking Echinacea tea in an attempt to prevent the post-stress illness that tends to attack in moments such as these.

Took a little trip to Chinatown with Ariel and Kyle on Monday. We walked into a shop with a yellow and red awning inscribed with complex characters and, in English "Beijing Trading Co.", which smelled of earth and something tangy. Dozens of big glass jars with silver lids filled the wall of shelves behind the counter- each with a different beige, white or brown coloured something in it. Roots, leaves... other things. "I'm looking for Yunnan Baiyao," I said to the lady behind the counter, feeling awkward over my pronunciation of the name. She said she didn't have any right now. We walked up the street into another, nearly identical shop. We waited our turn to talk to the herbalist. I ogled a jar of dried seahorses. They didn't have any Yunnan Baiyao either... Here I was, thinking you could just march into any Chinese pharmacy and pick this stuff up! Yunnan Baiyao is an herbal medicine which is used to reduce blood loss, and as a pain reliever. I was on a mission to get some for the maternity clinic in Haiti, and I was starting to feel like some kind of clandestine/intrepid/savvy Indiana Jones (not a perfect example, but you know what I'm getting at?) character... Searching through a foreign land to find an elusive herb to save mothers' lives! The shopkeepers in the third (nearly identical) shop, just around the corner from the second, were very helpful, and they had dried lizards on sticks in there. The fourth shop... had Yunnan Baiyao! I bought five boxes of capsules and stepped back out into the street, half expecting someone to come up and proposition me to buy some, since it was apparently such a hot commodity...

Since Monday's adventure, I have mostly been immersed my final paper for our Gender and Health course. This is what's going on now:

I've got all the essentials: passport, sunscreen, Chacos, head lamp, bathing suit, DivaCup, anti-malarials (stoked I didn't throw those out when I got home from Ghana!), Grantley Dick-Read's "Childbirth Without Fear", five boxes of Yunnan Baiyao and, of course, two big chocolate bars!

T-minus 33 hours until take-off from YVR! It will actually be Monday morning before I arrive in Port-Au-Prince... I have a 12 hour layover in L.A., which I will be taking advantage of by venturing out Santa Monica or Manhattan Beach. So, the preparations continue... Happy Friday to all and to all a good night!