Termite (In)Fest(Ation)



Hey, what are those funny little piles everywhere?

Are those leaves?

Oh. Yeah, those are bugs.

And they're everywhere.

For a couple days the Regional House was swarming with termites. They're harmless, and not really that gross, at least not until they start piling up in the shower, shedding their wings and piling up in the corners until you can't even see the floor. The only one who was happy to see the termites was Joseph, the cat, because he likes to eat them by the dozen, which is helpful but also a little disgusting to watch.

Sick Day.

I was sick yesterday. Also the internet went down, then the power went out, and I spent the entire day at the Regional House, looking green and lying on a mat while my fellow Volunteers brought me juice and ORS and checked on my (mild) fever.

I'm feeling much better today, and will most likely go back to village tomorrow. 

I'm sick.

I was just thinking "Oh, I've been here a month and a half and I haven't gotten sick yet! Awesome!"

And then my nose stuffed up, my left pinkie toenail fell off, and I started throwing up.

Luckily, if I were going to pick a day to get sick this probably would have been it. We have the weekend off from language classes, and a Peace Corps Land Cruiser was coming through Darou to bring my LCF (Language & Culture Facilitator, my tutor) back to the Training Center. I would have chosen to postpone getting sick until after my language assessment interview was completely over, but I suppose it could have been worse.

In any case, now I'm lying around in sick bay, sipping ORS and Emergen-C, and catching up on This American Life podcasts. I still have a "running stomach" (as they say in Pullo Fuuta) but I'm feeling better than I was this morning, and might even try to catch up on e-mails in a little bit.

My toe is pretty much fine, too, I stubbed it last week, and it looks weird but doesn't hurt.

UPDATE: ORS is so much less unpleasant with a Raspberry Propel-style drink packet mixed in. Emergen-C is great for normal water, but ORS is kinda gross. Many thanks to Chelsea (one of the other sick PCTs hanging out at the Center) for coming by and giving me some drink mix powder.

Highlights

A few of the more memorable things from the last couple weeks of training:

• Fielding questions about American culture as my mildly conservative Muslim host family watched a French-Canadian show called "Reportings" do an exposé on American co-eds on Spring Break in Cancun. Luckily they find it hilarious when drunk people fall over, and they also understand that every culture has its share of ridiculous people.
• Indian Soap Operas. They're 20 minutes of non-stop intense-gaze-filled melodrama backed by a soundtrack that's mostly thunderclaps and they're incredibly popular in small-town Senegal. 
• In Pulla Fuuta, my local language, the verbs for 'to vomit,' 'to plant,' and 'to spit' are tuutugol, tutugol, and tuttugol. I'm pretty sure that I've been showing up to dinner and then cheerfully announcing that I went to the school garden, where I spent the afternoon vomiting carrots, okra, and eggplant.
• Trash. In some areas there is so much trash. Clumps and piles and fields and acres of plastic bags, kitchen garbage, soda bottles, worn out shoes, anything and everything.
• Baobabs. There aren't any in my village, which is entirely built on sand, but there are zillions of them along the road to Thiès. The ones here aren't tall and column-looking, like the ones that come up when you google 'baobabs,' but wider and stumpier, extremely impressive in a gigantic, gnarled, squat sort of way.