Mais je ne suis pas encore médecin!!!

But I am not a doctor yet!~Youchaou Traoré has done it again: he has succeeded in being one of the only Malians I have met to actually follow through on any kind of specific time frame.  He told me he would inquire about an internship, and now I have one (the Malian version of one anyways).  He e-mailed me midweek before we left for our village stay, giving me the phone number of the head doctor at Kaliban Kuro's (a neighborhood relatively close to mine-Kalaban Kura) CSCOM (Community Health Center).  A phonecall later, I had a meetng with that doctor the next day.  While going to the meeting, I encountered all of the normal difficulties of being in Mali (the taxi driver not knowing where the CSCOM was, then finding it, leaving me to realize that there are multiple CSCOMs in Kaliban Kuro, so an intern there drove me to the correct place...about 20 minutes away by car), but once there, the planning process was incredibly simple.  My "internship" basically would consist of me shadowing the weekend doctor whenever I want, and I could begin the next morning. Thus 8 a.m. on Saturday morning found me back at the correct health center.  The taxi driver only got us slightly lost on the way.
    It was a fascinating morning.  I was able to watch several consultations (in which all of the diagnoses were Malaria), a few treatments being administered (for Malaria), and a vaccination campaign in action.  The latter was particularly interesting and the part of the experience most different from anything I have seen in the U.S.  Hordes of children came to the CSCOM at the same time, and the laidback nurses sitting in front of the building would nonchalantly inject any arm that happened to present itself in front of them.  They had me give a few of the injections, and I had to fight every fiber in my body that screamed "YOU ARE NOT TRAINED TO DO THIS! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!!"  Medical training in Mali, as are most things here, is much more hands-on than theoretical.  No matter how many times I say, "but I am not a doctor yet," the child in front of me was not going to receive this essential vaccine if I did not give it.
     Finally, around noon, I realized it was time to go home, or I would miss lunch with my host family.  The doctor pointed to a hill in the distance.  "You live in Kalaban Kura?" he asked.  "It is just on the other side of that hill.  Go down the road, turn left at the cell phone tower, and climb over the hill.  You will reach your neighborhood if you keep going straight."  An hour later, I had no idea where I was but had had quite an enjoyable little hike.  Giving in and flagging down a taxi, I was happy to find that I had somehow been walking in the right direction.  The ride was 3 U.S. dollars instead of the 4 it had been to go to the CSCOM.  That afternoon, I felt quite accoplished all in all, and I now have hope that at the end of this experience, I may be way closer to knowing something about medicine than at the start, even if je ne suis pas encore médécin.