Infancy makeup

Everyone dresses up for the naming ceremonies and they even use charcoal to stencil eyebrows on the newborn girls!  Apparently, it is also part of the New Year's celebration, too, because Baby Banel was wearing her holiday look when she came to was brought to me this weekend for an abscess. 

As i've mentioned before, there are a lot of abscesses here. And surprisingly there are a lot in infancy! I've had to lance quite a number of rather large abscesses on otherwise content newborns--some thing I would not be doing in the US. The photo included is after i'd drained and packed a rather nasty one. She is  wrapped up in a roll bandage---as in a torn and rolled strip of bed linen; as in the pretty much the exact kind of roll bandages that women's auxillary clubs sat around and rolled during the Civil War!!!! What i wouldn't give for a case or two or Kerlex and Kling rolls!!!!

Note the amulets around her neck and wrist to protect her from evil spirits and the like. The amulet's pouches may contain lockets of hair or bits of bone and maybe even a bit of paper with a verse from the Koran.