No one ever thinks to get a scar for a souvenir!

I wasn't a very accident-prone kid--never broke anything or needed so much as a stitch--so how perfectly appropriate is it that in Africa, of all places, I needed medical attetion for the first time in my life?

Two nights ago, I fell in a ditch.

All pain aside, falling in a ditch in Yaoundé is just about the most vile thing that could ever happen to someone. Cement ditches are the only infrastucture that's consistent in this town--electricty and running water come and go, but there's a trench on each side of each street. They contain not only trash, but rotting food, and--I wish I were exaggerating--raw sewage.

Street lights are sporadic at best, but it never occurred to me that, security aside, if you walk around at night, you may fall into a ditch full of raw sewage.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I fell head-first into a cement ditch about three feet deep and two feet wide. My head hit the opposite side, but my shoulder caught most of my weight, and my legs were splayed over the top. I'm glad no one saw me; they would have been laughing too hard to help.

I picked myself up quickly, appalled at how utterly disgusting the situation was. I lost a flip-flop and couldn't be bothered to look for it, so I walked home, half of me covered in sludge and one shoe missing.

Of course I had to pass by a bar full of men who no doubt wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

When I reached my house, I immediately jumped in the shower with my clothes on. Only then did I realize that I was bleeding profusely from my left knee.

After using nearly an entire bar of Dial soap on myself, I santized my knee and realized that the cut was deep. And wide. My host mother had left town that morning, so I called Teku, the progam director, who immediately came over with his wife to take me to the hospial.

A Cameroonian hospital, I should mention, would have been long condemned in the U.S. Supplies are few, the rooms simple and not very clean.

It was particulary unsettling to hear the nurse yell at her assitant that the tools weren't sanitary. (And uncomfortable, because they went out of their way to sanitze them for me, because I had to wonder if they bother to do so for Cameroonian patients.)

The nurse gave me a shot that was supposedly anaesthetic, but apparently African anaesthetics don't work, because the stitches hurt like bananas and I wimpered like a little baby. She asked why I was crying, and I don't know how to sass back in French well enough to say, You're jabbing at my knee with a needle; I'll cry if I want to.

Today I looked at them, and I've watched enough Grey's Anatomy to think that I wasn't sutured correctly...

Also, everything hurts, especially the bump on my head. And my back. And my shoulders.

But whatever, I'll have a sweet scar and not a bad story to go with it.