Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and Our Language Dilemma

The language dilemma was a big dilemma and it was hands down the most frustrating aspect of the trip.

Setting the scene; there were originally 7 women in our group. 2 supervisors and 5 others. One supervisor spoke a little French, the other was really good at speaking very loudly in Spanish in hopes of being understood and one of the rest of us spoke French. In fact the reason she was brought on board was because she spoke French. She had never been out of the country and had attended only 5 births or something like that. So she was our main source of translation.

Unfortunately she was also very mentally and emotionally unstable. We didn't know until we started making calls to her husband because she was being so difficult to deal with that she is extremely bi-polar and had postpartum psychosis (the kind where you want to kill yourself and/or your baby) for which she was hospitalized for 2 weeks. We all felt for her but she was really started to cramp everyone's style and made it really difficult to work.

We didn't make it through the first day before she started arguing in circles with other members of the group then throughout the next few days she started meeting random men and telling them where we lived and having embarrassing outbursts at meetings we were attending as guests. Ugh. So after 4 long days of her blowing up at us and making the group feel vulnerable by how freely she gave out money and our housing location we kicked her out of the program. She did not go out without a fight but push had come to shove and things improved by about 500% after that. No kidding. Except that we no longer had a translator. But she had refused to do that anymore within the first 2 days anyway, so no loss, really.