...Guess I'll Go Eat Worms...

"Nobody likes me...Everybody hates me...Guess I'll go eat worms...Long, thin, slimy ones...Short, fat, juicy ones...Guess I'll go eat worms!"
Does that bring back any memories?  I can remember my brother singing that song in boy scouts...now the girl scouts on the other hand would never be caught dead singing about worms...friends and flowers maybe!
Anyway...the point of this post is to tell you about de-worming, not eating worms.  The babes under my care (and in theory our whole center) are de-wormed every 3 months.  This is because our water source is not completely clean and they are constantly playing in the sand and then licking their fingers.  Because this is Mozambique, of course the medication they receive only comes in 100mg pills when they actually need to each take 500mg.  So it is a big production to get 50 kids under the age of 5 to take 5 pills each.  I say that, but it is not at all like what you are imagining!  In America it would take holding kids down, forcing them to open their mouths, and candy and stickers to cheer them up afterward.  Here it takes more effort to keep them from eating each others than it takes to get them to put the pills in their mouths.
This time I decided to lie up all the kids by room, bring them inside, and make them sit down.  Then started the game.  I explained that they each needed to take 5 and only 5 pills.  They could not share and they had to finish one before they could have another.  I placed one pill on each child's tongue.  They raced to see who could eat theirs first.  Then I made them raise their hands to show me they were done.  After all their hands were up in the air, then they had to open their mouths and show me there were no more pills to be seen.  Then it was on to pill number 2.  We continued on like this through 5 pills for each child...after child 50 I was exhausted.  But at least they will have no long, thin, slimy worms running through them!
Here's a few pictures of the cute little stinkers!