CHINA: A visit to Anyi village and scabies

Today was a particularly tough day for us.  It looks like Yun Mei has scabies.  At least, from what we could find online her symptoms seem to point in that direction.  Fortunately, Stacey is well prepared and we have a few tubes of scabies medication (Permethrin) with us, so we treated Yun Mei (and Stacey as a precaution).  Scabies can get pretty bad if left alone and doesn’t really go away on its own (nicknamed the “seven year itch”).  Fortunately it’s fairly easy to treat: you spread the medication cream over her whole body from neck to soles of her feet and leave it on overnight.  Might have been easier if she weren't screaming. One treatment usually does the trick, they say.  So we gave her the treatment last night and sent all her clothes to get washed and even called the front desk at 10 pm asking for clean sheets and towels (scabies can be pretty contagious).

We started the morning by traveling to a really interesting old village called Anyi, about an hour outside of Nanchang.  

It’s over a thousand years old and the same several families still live and work there (so they're really old).  Yun Mei was acting kinda grouchy and stubborn all morning.   

Mostly she wanted Stacey to carry her around and would just stand there stubbornly when Stacey was tired of lugging her around.  Didn’t really want to look at us or interact at all.  She gets anxious and shuts down socially and emotionally when we go anywhere.

Mama!  Daddy's touching me again!!

So, somehow this 98-year old guy got me to buy some of his home-made shoes made of grass. Two pairs.  I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with them. 

"Heh heh, Americans are such suckers"

Notice the split pants on this baobao.  This one is wearing something underneath but most of them don't.  It just makes it so much easier to go to the bathroom.  You just squat and let it go.

We took treats to the children at the little school and handed out the extras to little friends we met in the village. This cutie is dressed in lots of layers.

This camphor tree was planted when the first villagers settled here so its almost 1300 years old.  You tie a red ribbon to a branch and you get to make a wish.  Guess if the ribbons are free.

How can you resist picking her up and squeezing her??  Easy.  She screams and kicks if you try.

First smile of the day!

Probably not many people get quite as excited as Stacey at the sight of a nice vegetable garden.

Yes, indeedy.  Thems are pig intestines!  And why wouldn't you hang them from the wall?

Ah yes, the Chinese penchant for hanging raw bits of animal carcass from the walls and ceilings.

Another really old geezer we saw wandering around the village.  Geez, it's almost time to drag that one out to the glue factory. (Tomorrow's his birthday)

After the village our guide took us to the shop of a master porcelain craftsman. Jiangxi province is famous for their porcelain.  As they say, "as thin as paper, as white as jade, as bright as a mirror, and as sound as a bell".  Really really beautiful stuff.  I have to admit we spent a little money there.  Yun Mei was pretty well behaved but was obviously getting more and more tired/bored/uncomfortable.   

She was whiney all the way back to the hotel and as soon as we walked in the door she immediately stripped off all her clothes and climbed in the bathtub and turned on the water.  Pretty clear message that she wants to take a bath, I guess.  But then she had another allergic reaction to the scabies and  got more and more upset. By the end of her bath she was just howling.  We got her out and dried but she wouldn’t let us put anything on her at all.  She just cried and cried and writhed and squirmed for over an hour.  Not quiet whimpers but big full-throated screams, one after another.   

Not a happy child.

All we could do was just let her cry in Stacey’s lap.  No touching, or blankets or clothes.  She had what looked like hives on her arms, so we were at least able to get some Benadryl in her and finally she started calming down and was running around playing and laughing a while later.  Apparently Benadryl does NOT make her sleepy.

Yes a happy child.

She did a smaller version of the same kind of thing at bed time.  Some kind of reaction to the Scabies and the medication.  Apparently the meds will kill all the scabies bugs (tiny, microscopic mites) in her skin but the itching takes a few weeks to go away until her body stops having allergic reactions to the scabies eggs and other nastiness left under her skin.  She was up several times in the night and the only way we could get her back to sleep was for Stacey to hold her close and rock back and forth.  Poor Stacey was completely exhausted by the time we finally got her into a real sleep at about 3:30.  -Mark