Two weeks

I will be on a minibus, trying to breathe in the stifling heat of Malawi's tropical hot season.

1 Canadian Dollar = 125.941 Malawi Kwacha (when I was there it went from about 1:30 to 1:55).

The mangoes will ripen around the end of my stay, about the end of December. Bananas are year-round. As are passionfruit. And guavas.

I will be wearing sunscreen and a Tilley hat (oh so high fashion). I need to buy new sandals because I just realised I threw out the ones I was intending to take with me. Where in Canada sells SANDALS in NOVEMBER??? Ye Gods.

I have to get an appointment with someone who will prescribe me some lariam or something. But the dreams are super-wild. Not really nightmares, just way too real for comfort. Particularly for someone like me, who without benefit of psychoactive substances already regularly gets, as my mother calls it, "the Hag."

I will be attempting to convince myself that I am not REALLY afraid of spiders (of course not, that would be silly, they are usually harmless) even if they ARE the size of dinner plates. Yes, I have actually seen spiders that big. I have no idea what sort, I called them banana spiders because they lived in the banana trees. And they barely moved, and they spun the most amazing webs made out of tempered steel or something, you could practically hang your laundry on them.

Nor am I afraid of:
giant field mice
snakes of various colours and sizes
three-inch-long-flying cockroaches

Etcetera.

What me, getting a little nervous? What makes you say that?

Money

I don't think I'm in it for the money.

It would, on the other hand, be nice to be able to afford to pay off my ginormous debt and buy a house, like a normal person.

So, I am working on my CaRMS, and it tells me what I will earn in various parts of the country as a first-year medical resident. This is salaried, for an 80-hour workweek, with moonlighting illegal here in QC, though not necessarily elsewhere.

And I was reading the papers, about the cols-bleus in TMR with a 36-hour week (paid hourly, with opportunity for overtime) demanding an 11% raise, and throwing a hairy fit when they were refused.

You know what? Even with no overtime, their gross salary is $5000-$12000 more than what I will earn, wherever I go. And, of course, if I was to stay here, once I finished my residency I would have to pay the government $300 000 to stay.

Remember that when you have to wait six months to get your gallbladder out.