I woke up drenched in sweat (which I don't particularly mind). There hasn't been electricity for hours, so everything and everybody is hot. At least once a day, somebody in the house marvels at how I always sleep with a blanket in the 50-degree days (when I nap) and 30-degree nights. People here shower twice or three times a day as a result of the continuous sweating, and I'm something of an unhygienic weirdo for only getting around to it once most days, and only sometimes twice.
At the ER, I'm worse dressed than everybody else, even though I never dress this well in Canada: black dress pants and a tucked in shirt. Even the janitors are immaculate in their dress, and it's not surprising to see any given man shine his shoes during a shift. The women look equally immaculate and beautiful. It seems to me that dressing well is one of the ways of maintaining dignity regardless of how poor the person is. An old man who was unimaginably poor but carried this dignity once told me that he would rather commit suicide than leave his house looking like me.
tarek : )