first illness (the final battle or merely warmups??)

10/01/06
Well, I am quite lucky to have survived just fine my first bout of illness in Africa. I haven’t been sleeping well lately (largely due to the local discotheques) and I think this made me more prone to picking up some sort of stomach virus. It set me in an awful state. I went and bought a thermometer, but as I tried to clean in, I used water that was too hot and it broke. I had attended the installation of the archbishop earlier in the day (the mass alone, excluding the following speeches was 4 hrs!) and I could definitely tell something was wrong. Sore muscles and lots of head tension. I missed lunch and upon waking up from a much needed nap I couldn’t even imagine putting food in my stomach. Well, forcing myself to eat some rice at dinner time, I felt an urgent call to find some vessel to orally expel all my food (colloquially: puking). I tell you, I never felt better! Today waking up, I think the fever (Never actually tested) has subsided and besides a little head tension (sinus headache?) and a little hunger (understandable given that I hadn’t really had a meal since breakfast yesterday) I feel great. Just another day in paradise…. Well paradise would be an exaggeration given a large disregard for the environment here, widespread abject poverty, huge self esteem issues related to colonialism and post colonialism, a complete lack of recycling (besides coke and beer bottles, which are always shipped back to the producer who just reuses them as they are… I really hope that they clean them!) and dust everywhere from the dirt roads that seems to penetrate every crevice of your body…. Just another day in paradise.


PS- I had a sweet (fever?) dream the other day, where I dreamnt that we had discovered a new powersource. With nuclear energy you split atoms (fission) and in that process energy is released. Well, we all the sudden discovered how to split time and in the splitting of one second we had all the energy of the universe. I expect that if the dream were to continue there would have been some cataclysmic event.

PPS- I have been in Africa for two months… unbelievable.

PPPS- Here are some more trite, but revealing examples of the self esteem issue in Africa. If someone in a villiage has a chicken that is bigger than the others, regardless of its color, it is a mzungu chicken. If there are any eggs that are larger than other eggs, the smaller one is the black chicken, the larger one is the mzungu chicken. If someone eats well here, they might say that they ate like a mzungu. These may seem like small examples, but they reveal a basic attitude that mzungu or whitness is associated with anything that is better here.