Dr. Mirwais put out his hand and signaled for me to stop. "Please, sit, women here don't work." First culture clash. Since it was the first day, Kim and I obliged to just sit while Art did all the work. It wasn't half bad, though he kept giving us dirty looks. Seriously though, I didn't want to offend anyone on the first day. We finally went down to the lab room and I was able to tell Art why I wasn't helping. He then proceeded to talk up how well educated Kim and I were.
So we finally unwrapped the cryostat and decided we should go to the Bazaar to get tables, reagents and tools. We had requested alcohol, formalin, paraffin and xylene before we left the USA. They are fairly common reagents in industry, so Art didn't think it would be an issue to get.
On past trips, Art and Kim have both been able to just get up and go wherever needed, whenever. This time we have rules about security, so we had to call for permission and ask them to scout the location first. Then our car came to pick us up. This took about 45 minutes.
We finally got to the edge of the Bazaar, and went to a shopping plaza with medical supplies. Kids came up to the car and tried to look inside as we were parking. Our guard Sabor was with us, and accompanied us inside the store. He was pretty awesome. The store we went to was interesting - there were all kinds of drugs on the shelves, buckets of medical tools, old microscopes on shelves, even a large model of a heart! They gave us a can of the Afghan version of Red Bull while we were there, with a piece of gauze as a napkin. It tasted the same but I didn't drink much of it, for fear of having too much caffeine. We got forceps without teeth (they took ones with teeth, cut them off and polished them), a small amount of formalin, xylene, alcohol and slide sized coverslips. The paraffin, sodium bicarbonate, hematoxylin and eosin had to be obtained elsewhere in the city or in Pakistan somewhere. Ok, so no processing or staining going to happen today.
We also went to another store to pick out desks to put the equipment on, until they can get permanent lab tables put in. We saw an area with lots of Afghan rugs, then went to a paint store to get some brushes for frozen sections.
When we returned to the hospital, we had lunch and then plugged in the equipment to make sure it worked. Everything was going well until we plugged in the cryostat. Something happened and it made a popping sound. After some investigation, we determined that a resistor had been fried and needed to be replaced! The electrician went to the Bazaar to look for one. Unfortunately, there were none in town and the part had to be obtained from Pakistan. Ok, no frozen sections going to happen today.
We finished unwrapping and placing the rest of the equipment on the desks. Originally, we got 2, but decided we needed a third, which was brought to us almost immediately. Dr. Mirwais doesn't waste time. If we need something, he makes someone go get it RIGHT THEN. He seems like a very powerful person.
While we were in town, Dr. Mirwais wanted to have a grand opening for the lab. We were told that Afghani's LOVE openings and closings. Some places will have a 3rd grand opening....Well today was Tuesday, and he wanted to see if we could do it Wednesday. As in, TOMORROW. We finally talked him into Thursday, stating we hadn't actually gotten to make a slide yet. So we drove around the corner to the Spinghar hotel to reserve the hall. Fortunately, it was booked Thursday and not available until Sunday. So we set the date for our "grand opening." His family lives in Kabul so he decided to return home that night until Saturday.
When we returned to the hospital at the end of the day, a tailor was there to measure Kim & I for local outfits. We couldn't go to the Bazaar so he brought the tailor to us. He showed us some different shirt designs, then asked us about colors. I picked green and blue, she picked blue and magenta.
Then we headed back home to the guesthouse to recoup.
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