Saturday, February 13, 2010

The past few days have been very interesting. The first wave of sickness has passed through our group, so the stress levels for everyone, i think, have been elevated a bit. We´re not exactly sure what happened, but everyone within our Cañas group was sick by the end of Thursday. Sam (a neighbor trainee who essentially sleeps with the pigs) awoke early Thursday morning with everything coming up while I awoke early Thursday morning with everything going down. By 10am, Peace Corps decided that Sam needed to be sent to San Salvador to stay in a hotel just in case he needed to go to the hospital for IVs. By 2ish, the lab had returned my results for me to find out that I somehow contracted amoebas (as my Trainee instructors put it, I am not the first and certainly not the last to become pregnant with amoebas - they are waterborne, so somehow I consumed water from the pila *** ). That afternoon, during our return bus trip to Cañas, Emily, who had been feeling nauseous all day, threw up on the bus - also not uncommon haha. Current volunteers who sat for a panel of questions notified us that during their training, not a single trainee graduated to the status of volunteer without a similar incident on the bus - so that should provide many interesting stories haha.

Today, Saturday, we rode via micro (pronounced mee-croh) to a current volunteer´s site. As the pavement slowly turned to dust, a silly grin across everyone´s face asked the question ´What in the WORLD have I gotten myself into?´ Humor is a wonderful cure for such cases, so we joked about how wonderfully content the hogs looked rolling around in the mud. Also that, as volunteers, we really don´t demand that much - just running water, electricity, internet access, wood floors, and laundry service haha. Just kidding. Well nevermind, we really did joke about it, but it just became much more real today. Another group, still unknown why, was taken to the beach today. I feel that they may have seriously missed out on an opportunity to experience what a site might be like. The volunteer had recently set up a chicken shack for egg production to demonstrate the effectiveness of using a shack instead of free roaming chickens (contains egg production, allows for easier vaccination, etc). His house was a nice cinderblock structure with metal sheeting for a roof (very sturdy and weather proof). He had connected power to his neighbor and just paid when the electricity went over the allowed subsidized amount. The one thing that I took out of the experience that I really would like to mention when sites are being decided: I really would like to be in a larger town. I don´t need water, internet, etc., I simply thrive off of human activity. I like knowing that I have close neighbors or that certain spots in town will always have people to converse with, etc. Isolation will be a difficult thing to cope with.

I do believe that about sums up the past few days (class was obviously involved, ZZzzz). Until later, Cuidale (take care of yourself).


***a pila is a large concrete cistern. water runs to the town 3-4 days/week so they have to collect the water for dry days. also, the pila contains many small fish to 1) clean the siding of algae 2) keep the water moving 3) eat the mosquito larvae is hopes of preventing dengue and malaria (effectiveness yet to be determined). We are NOT supposed to drink from these as they have maaaany foreign objects that our bodies are not yet accustomed to. So somewhere that theory fell apart and I contracted amoebas.