Kernals of white rice

19 Apr 12

Some bread and butter, a couple apples (thanks to my LCF and hard to come by here!), and the name of the title are most of the foods that have sustained me the last couple of days, and diluted Gatorade (cheers again bro!).  After a month being here and not getting sick, I thought, ‘why not make it the entire time without getting sick, how wonderful that would be!’ and then I got sick.  But I’m pretty stubborn and hate throwing up, so I think I make myself suffer more by keeping it all inside accounting for tummy aching that lasts just 24 hrs or so, where the pain is much more manageable when I’m horizontal versus vertical.  Other than that I’ve had it pretty darned good. 

My family has been over the top supportive of ensuring a speedy recovery.  I found it rather ironic that while filling out one of my TDA’s on clean water and sanitation practices and technologies used here, my namesake offers me some juice as medicine that they just made from unfiltered and un-cleaned water likely from the pump and thus safer than from the open well, but still, comical timing.  I drank most of it.

Regardless, I’m on the mend and hope to stop daydreaming about food that doesn’t exist here, soon.  The night that I missed dinner, I heard extra voices outside and was almost certain in my given state that the one night I sat out on dinner was the night they were eating chicken fried steak with gravy, steamed local veggies of carrots and broccoli and peas, and a fresh cut salad with tomatoes.  With plenty of salt and pepper and mashed potatoes and butter of course, and freshly baked dinner rolls, all around romantic candlelit lighting.  I was almost certain of it and found myself pouting in my bed that I was missing it.  Fasting and food sickness does funny things.  As do the anti-malarial meds which I think can be thrown in as an excuse to any oddity these days.  True story: one of our fellow trainees thought the mouse CHEWING HER HAIR was a mephalaquin dream and so tried to ignore it until she realized it wasn’t a dream.  She told one of our volunteers that has been here over a year and her response was, “And you didn’t ET? I think mouse in the hair might be where I draw the line!”  ET by the way stands for early termination I think, referring to leaving your post or assignment by your own choice, before the two year agreement.  Other ways for early termination to occur include medical separation and administrative separation, where it wasn’t your choice to leave but some medical reason, or Peace Corps administration deciding for you to go home for say, you not taking your prophylaxis, or other reasons.

Also, I think it’s important to note, keeping this post on the random and jumpy side of things, that I’m a vegetarian and don’t even really like meat.  But what I’d give for some country fried steak!  Or even fish and chips from good ‘ol Great Britain, and I definitely don’t fancy fish (damn you Neil Gaiman!).  I also can’t wait to stop imagining that every other building in my village is a cheap hole in the wall Mexican food place wanting to serve me cheese enchiladas and potato tacos, because they aren’t!  And I’d be surprised if I could even find Mexican food in this country let alone, region of the world (Mexican food that would meet an Arizonan’s standards that is, where believe it or not, the place I dream most about is a hole in the wall in Fairbanks Alaska that serves delicious cheese enchiladas and potato tacos all for under $5 US if memory serves me right!  That’s impeccable for Fairbanks or AK in general). 

One thing that always works incredibly well though, is to go outside and look up at the backwards sky.  A friend sent me a link to a PCV’s blog from Ethiopia who wrote about the realities of PC in Africa, beyond the holding of hands of kids, which is there too.  But they wrote about going outside and letting Africa save you when you needed it to, and thus far I haven’t been disappointed yet. 

Now if the critters could just stop making so much noise in the sacks above my head, I’d just be peachy, but don’t want come off as too needy!