Life in Africa Isn't All Fun and Games

Warning: Parts of this post will be disturbing for some readers. At least the events described were disturbing enough to experience.

So the last post ended with the words "I can't help it if I'm lucky." Man, was I asking for it. Within 12 hours of writing those words it seems a virus carried on some food that I ate brought about my worst week in Peace Corps. It started with vomiting, a slight fever, and then things got serious. I think everyone is familiar with the word diarrhea, but I submit that most Americans don't really understand what that word means. I do. I was reminded approximately every one or two hours for three straight days, then five or six times a day for a few days after that. Oh, and I have a squat toilet. Up to then I had seemed to have a stomach of steele, but I now know that's not the case. I can safely say that was my worst week in Peace Corps. A week in bed running to the bathroom every hour with only my satellite radio for company. Actually, that's not fair, a lot of the teachers came by and brought me food and things. They were very good to me.

I continued to feel sick all of last weekend and finally Monday felt pretty good. Monday was the first time in nine days I managed to eat two meals on the same day. That was fantastic. Needless to say I was still pretty weak most of this past week. This weekend I came into Lushoto again to get out of the house and since I was out of food. I hope I never get a bug like this again, but these things happen. Life in Africa ain't always pretty.

Since I've recovered things are going well. In two weeks we have graduation at the school so everyone's focused on that right now. For some reason they do graduation before the national exams which I think is a big mistake because now the students aren't very focused on anything except the graduation. All the classes do a song and a dance performance as part of the ceremony so they are spending a lot of time rehearsing. It should be real nice and I'll try to get some pictures put up here. That's all I've got for now. I may not be able to post as often now because there is only electricity for two days a week now. I think many of my readers already know how I feel about the power company here, so I won't go into it.

So the moral of today's post, kids, is don't eat raw vegetables from questionable sources. Bad things happen when you do that. Really bad things.