Post-fever images

Lying on my bed sweating, in the hot afternoon, one bat and then another swooping silently through my room. They are so peaceful.

I drop my mosquito net, sweating and texting and watching their silhouettes dip in and out of my periphery.

You start thinking in terms of tradeoffs: I'd rather have bats than mosquitoes, I'd rather be meticulous about my filter than watching my water be boiled, I'd rather not eat meat than eat it and increase my chances of getting sick.

Mustafa, my aunt's son, about five years old, dances to the music blasting through the neighboorhood around 8 pm, after dark. We are in the back courtyard, and from the light of a kerosene lamp I watch him and his sister dance. They dance better than most adults I know.

Our cat and her kitten have their daily standoff: her "teenage" kitten still wants to nurse, so she has to run the kitten off every day. My mama puts out food for them both.

Cold ginger beer soda at lessons today. Feeling a lot better. Long rains soon. 

Soda and fries

There's a good moon on the rise. Today I've felt infinitely better than yesterday. We had class and my fellow trainees informed me the found the SODA BARIDI yesterday!!!! Soda baridi (cold soda) has been akin to the holy grail or an oasis in the desert for us.

Let me explain: we are living in a tiny village that has pretty much no electricity, except for a few houses wealthy enough to have tiny solar panels on their roofs that power some small indoor lights for after sunset. There is no electricity for anything else: no refrigerators, no freezers, no electric stoves.

Our instructor informed us that down my road, near the mission, there is soda baridi. Yesterday I was too sick to go on the garden tour my group went on. Which took them to a garden near the mission. And lo and behold, soda baridi!

It didn't take too much arm-twisting to get two of my fellow trainees to walk to soda baridi with me today after class. I got an ice-cold passion fruit Fanta. It kind of hurt to drink it, what with the coldness and the sugar and the carbonation and my stomach being essentially empty for the past few days, but it was so worth it.

Soda baridi, we will meet again. And again. And again.

Tonight my mama and my aunt (that's the best way to refer to her) showed me how to make chipsi mayai. My favorite Tanzanian dish. Nothing beats what is essentially a French fry omelet.

And I ate an orange and two bananas today. It was an A+ day as far as food goes.

Cipro time

Yesterday I was so sick that I did not write a blog entry, so I am writing it today. Let me just describe the scene of yesterday and I think it will convey how I was feeling.

Me: swaddled in damp kangas and handkerchiefs, lying in bed under my half-open mosquito net, an empty bucket beside me.

Things in bed with me: thermometer, two phones, ripped-open packets of various meds, my Swahili phrase book that has medical phrases, my solar lantern.

When I got home from Swahili class and realized I felt especially awful, I took my temperature and it read 103.8F. What!

If you are in Africa and don't feel like it's the weather that's making you hot, you are probably sick.

So I called my medical officer, and after describing every last gory detail to him, he told me to start a course of Cipro, along with ibuprofen to bring my fever down.

I spent the rest of the day and night harnessing the energy of evaporation, which would of course have worked better had it been less humid.

It's actually a great feeling when you start sweating again.

One week past in a somewhere of Africa

Tomorrow will be one week of homestay already. I feel like I should have made more progress than I have, but that's water over the dam, or under the bridge, or a sunk cost, as they say.

I'm pretty sure my feet will be perpetually stained with the red dusty clay that is everywhere. It gets everywhere: soaked into the edges of your notebook paper, into your clothes, seeping into the soles of your feet.

Sometimes you feel like the land is claiming you. You feel like the heat and the water scarcity and the sun are all very good reasons not to be here.

But people are, have been, and will be here.

The ice cream bicycle man cycled by today as we were waiting for our ride to our group lesson today. Nothing sounds more tantalizing than the small bell chiming closer and closer every time he pedals his old bike with a green cooler of Popsicles bungeed onto the back. It was a bit of a Pavlovian moment.

But unfortunately our teachers advised us not to buy ice cream, because it could be made with contaminated water and could quite possibly make us sick.

The chimes moved away from us, growing fainter in the beating sun and waves of heat.

First day "off" in my village

On my day off, I "slept in" until 7 am, took a shower, ate breakfast (a semi-hard boiled egg, bread, and chai), swept and mopped my floor and the hall, washed my clothes (with the help of mama), took a siesta from 11 to 12 (too hot to do anything), helped cook lunch and dinner, ate an orange, had lunch (a beef broth soup, then ugali with machicha, a spinach-like dish), then spent hours learning Swahili words with a friend of a neighbor who is in town. From what I understand, he brought his friend via motorcycle from town today so he could make a proposal. I'm pretty sure it went well.

Heat, chopping vegetables, stiff and fresh clean sun-dried laundry.

More Swahili words than I can remember right now.

Good company.

Goodnight.

Miles and lifetimes

This morning went by in a semi-dehydrated blur of Swahili lessons. We learned how to make water filters yesterday, but my family already has one, so I brought mine to class to assemble so we will have a filter there. One of our language instructors lives in that building as well, so now he won't have to buy all bottled water to drink.

I still don't know what made me sick, and since the filters can leak or crack, drinking water that is only filtered is not 100% safe. Peace Corps recommends that we boil and then filter, then preferably bleach, our water before drinking.

I'm pretty sure my family doesn't boil the water they filter, so I'm going to try to bring that up tomorrow.

We finished lessons in the early afternoon. I ate a little and then helped my mama cook, fighting the tiredness that has been following me all day.

A girl who seems close to my age, (the first I've seen here in my age range, actually), who I think might be one of my mama's granddaughters, came through our gate with a bucket of wet clean laundry on her head, dressed in three blue-green kangas (similar to sarongs) of different patterns. She started to hang up her laundry on our lines strung across the courtyard. First the whites, brighter than bright. Kangas in many colors and patterns: blue and white, red plaid, more greens. She walked between the lines, clothespinning pieces here and there. There is no wind, just sun. Some of the laundry drips cool water on her bare arms, making darker splashes on her skin. The laundry drips make dark red spots on the hard packed clay.

I am tired and thirsty and in Africa.

First sickness

Today would have been a great day, if I hadn't been struggling with what is now the third day of being sick. I won't go into the gory details, but let's just say it's a GI thing, and I'm not talking about vomiting.

My training class reconvened at our central training site today, and stories were swapped about our respective homestay experiences thus far. We got our second rabies shot, and I talked to my MO (Medical Official, or doctor) about my symptoms. She said she thinks I'm fine for now, but we will keep a watch on how long it goes on and if it changes.

I told my mama about it this morning, as I thought she could probably use an explanation for why I was hurrying outside to the choo (toilet) building three times last night. I feel like now the entire village knows I'm sick. I've received "pole sana"s (very sorry) from a few other mamas today who seem concerned as well.

Since the transition into homestay, it is very hard to pinpoint potential reasons one might get a stomach bug. It could be anything really.

Broke out my woolen blanket Peace Corps provided us with, and hunkering down for now. Let's see how this goes.

I have homework for my Swahili class that's due tomorrow. Since I really don't feel so hot tonight I'm going to try to do it tomorrow before class. I've always done work better in the morning anyway.