Crazy Few Months

Well it’s been a while since I wrote, huh? I have this thing that I won’t write a blog unless I feel like it’s full of emotion. Generally I shoot for funny, but some depressing blogs have slipped in too. Of late it seems like every blog I ever started was very monotone. I’ll try to fill you in on more-or-less what has been going on in the past few months.

March – Had some work getting a couple of different communities started on some water projects. I started to work with my local mayor’s office to figure out what was going on with the water system here. Apart from that I spent a lot of time avoiding my office and sitting in my house watching movies. It’s interesting how you don’t realize you’re depressed until you start to feel normal again.

Now I do want to clarify that I’m not depressed because I don’t like my life here or something like that. It’s just life in harder some times and you just don’t feel like dealing. There are days and weeks when you don’t want to interact with people and sit and dream about what you’re missing in the States, which generally brings down your mood a bit. When you have work sporadically it makes it hard too because you don’t always have something to make you feel productive and important.

April – Beginning of the month I had some more sporadic work and then it all came to an end. Waiting on communities to get stuff together, etc. killed my motivation. I pretended to be working on the Junta de Agua guide, but that was generally a big farce. Much of April was spent doing nothing, and when I generally don’t have anything real to do I avoid the office, which means the internet as well.

Also, another factor encouraging me to avoid the office … a bundle of puppies! My friend gave me the keys to her house and almost immediately her dog gave birth to my dog’s puppies. Woops. They are just about the cutest things ever and so I spent much of my time playing with them and sitting in Jackie’s house watching History Channel. I know, terrible.

May – May has flown by. I started the month with a study that I finished in a couple of days; went directly into another study with Kathryn that took about a week. After that we had mid-term medicals. We have been living in our sites for a year now! Can you believe it?? At that point in our service we all have to go to Tegucigalpa for a couple of days to get all these tests done to make sure Honduras isn’t slowly killing us with weird diseases.

I will tell you it’s quite interesting having to do all this doctor stuff in Spanish. By interesting I mean stressful.

So we check into our hotel rooms and our poop sample cups are immediately distributed to us. Joy! The meaning of “regular bowel movements” has become a foreign concept to all of us and in order to ensure that we can fulfill our duties the next morning my group headed off to the mall to eat as much lovely fast food as possible. I had Wendy’s and then went to some cool yogurt stand and got yogurt with chocolate and strawberries mixed in. I love the Multiplaza Mall! It’s our haven whenever we are in Teguz. Any moment we don’t spend in the Peace Corps office we automatically jet off to the mall to wander around and look at all the things we can no longer afford. They have Cinnabon!! It’s like we’re teenagers again.

Anyways, had my first poop-in-a-cup experience … It’s hard man! Not as in the aiming sense, but it’s a lot of pressure having to deliver a sample that early in the morning! Ok, I’ll stop there. But, I am glad to report that the Ferguson stomach has fared me well and I have no parasites. I was kind of worried because on my first water study that month I chugged a 3-liter bottle of unknown origin Honduran water because I was so thirsty. I still have not managed to gather the courage to pee on a study either and suffered the rest of the day for it! But, at least it didn’t give me parasites.
Next stop was the dentist’s office. She was very nice and has a nicer office than my dentist in the States. Also, I got my teeth cleaned and everything by the dentist herself. I must admit, I missed the dental hygienist from home who would always ask questions that would require more than a grunt response whenever she had all her tools and crap shoved in your mouth. Again, good news! No cavities! As always I have to floss more and I have receding gums from putting too much pressure on my canines. I clamp my jaws shut now because of stress and therefore I have an awkward receding gums.
Met with the Peace Corps doctor and nothing new there; they’re amazed that I’m never in Teguz with health problems. My appointment was fairly easy, but then they decided to send the asthmatics to the lung doctor. Apparently, this is new Peace Corps policy to keep an eye on those of us with lung complications. Kind of makes me angry considering all the importance they put on it before I joined Peace Corps when it turns out they didn’t really care about it at all!

So, get there with my friend and the doctor is supposed to get there at 4 pm. Her hours are 4 pm – 7 pm. Odd. The doctor is almost an hour late! AN HOUR! I mean in the States if a doctor is late they will notify you or at least apologize. I went to check in for my appointment and the secretary looks me square in the face and says, “She’s not here yet.” Ok, I understand punctuality in this country is nonexistent, but when you get towards the hour mark and the doctor doesn’t to be interested in showing up for her appointments … well then maybe you should say something to the patients not so patiently waiting? I looked at the secretary lady at 45 minutes and she shot me this look like, “Yes? What do you want from me?” That’s when you forget about countries you once knew that functioned somewhat properly and you and you hunker down to watch yet another episode of some house design show dubbed in Spanish.

The doctor finally shows up and beckons me into the office. I’m sweating so bad just for the anticipated awkwardness of explaining my condition in Spanish. The equivalent in English would probably go something like, “No breath when run. Cough always now. Lots of dust.” The Peace Corps doctors wrote up a little explanation of my perpetual sinus congestion and productive cough. So the doctor has me do a peak flow test, which I have always hated. I’m standing there and she has me blow … Right. Then she does some other test with a machine to measure the functionality of my smaller lung parts or something. Turns out I have a sinus infection. Right. Then she tells me I don’t have asthma. Did I get that wrong because of the language difference? Kind of hard to though because “no” and “asthma” as more or less the same in bother languages … I don’t have asthma. I didn’t point out to her that I have sports induced asthma and she made me do the tests with me standing in a doctor’s office. I didn’t point out that she didn’t have me do any stress exercises before the peak flow test. She kind of scared me so I took my drugs and left. Don’t have asthma. Silly.

That night we went to get … SUSHI! I have never been more content in my life. I had miso soup and sushi. So amazingly wonderful that I can’t even describe it. I think I almost cried when I took my first sip of soup and first bite of a California role. Sushi is one of the foods that we don’t even have a hope of recreating in our homes. I mean my friends are amazing cooks, but they can’t make Sushi the way the Japanese do and therefore it was heavenly.

Instead of taking advantage of the night life in Teguz or the many places that sell decent beer the whole lot of us returned to the hotel to take advantage of the … cable. Most of us don’t have T.V.s and we definitely don’t get Teguz quality cable in our sites. You become oddly intolerable of any program in Spanish. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked, “Why isn’t there anything in English??” Only to get the response, “Hannah it’s because we’re in a Spanish speaking country!” Right.

Sounds lame, but that’s reality of it. We have one rule always: no watching any program in Spanish. It could be the best movie/program in the world, but we will refuse to watch it if it’s dubbed. No go. Not allowed. Inevitably in our search for an acceptable program we will pass Family Guy or The Simpsons on at least one channel. This will prompt someone in the room to fly into a rage about why they even bother showing these programs because the humor, even if it isn’t lost in translation, is completely lost on people here. There’s an inevitable sequence of events when we watch T.V. together:

1) Insistence on a remote
2) Reminder that we cannot watch anything in Spanish
3) Rant of Family Guy/The Simpsons
4) Criticize music videos in Spanish
5) Find a good program and watch if for a few minutes before we realize it’s not in English, but we just didn’t realize it and are forced to change the channel again …
6) Squeal when we inevitably find something worth watching.
Hey, it’s the little things that count!

I’m walking around at the moment (still) looking like a heroin addict because the PCMOs (Peace Corps doctors) made me get blood drawn. I’ve always had problem with getting blood drawn and IVs. My arms just don’t seem to have very good, accessible veins. I understand this and generally warn people that my veins always put up a fight. It never fails that the nurses don’t believe me, thinking that I don’t have confidence in their skills; the problem is that they have too much confidence.

So I walk in there and they sit me down and the nurse pokes and prods me for a while before she isolates a vein that satisfies her. Deep breath, she slides the needle in … nothing. She gives me a look like, “Give it up!” She slides the needle a little bit to the right, to the left. Meanwhile, I’m sitting there trying not to notice the needle in my arm moving every which way with still no blood coming out. Then she calls over another guy and he saddles up like, “I got this!”

He chooses to torture the same vein and gets a little bit of blood into the vile. I look at the tiniest trickle of blood and ask, “And how many of these do you need??” Three. Poop. Then, I liked this part, they have the nerve to blame it on me! I’m not relaxed and the blood won’t flow. Excuse me?? You want me to relax when you’ve practically severed my arm at my elbow by jabbing that darn needle everywhere? Would you be relaxed? I’m trying with ever nerve in my body to maintain consciousness because the last thing I want to be is the white girl that fainted in the office, but you’re making it awfully hard right now and I’ve never come close to fainting before in my life!

Now, I’m not a doctor and maybe my state of high stress at the time (most of the time) was causing my blood to flow slower, but a little lesson in patient-doctor relating skills: don’t blame it on the patient! That generally does not encourage them to relax!
He finally gave my poor arm a rest after he had successfully bludgeoned my vein to death. He still hadn’t gotten the blood he wanted/needed and moved his torturous practices to the other arm. Instead of using some needle that just lets the blood flow naturally into the vile he chose to use a syringe to DRAW the blood out. He locates the vein, tells me to relax in response to which I shot him a death glare, and he shoves this massive needle into my arm and a couple of times pulls out the little stopper guy before he draws out blood. He practically fills the syringe and I’m just about out when he finally guesses he has enough. NEVER AGAIN. If they want blood from me again in Honduras they’re going to have to evacuate me to D.C. where people have some good doctoring skills and don’t stab my arm to death.

On the bright side though, when people in town have asked me where I’ve been and I say in Teguz for doctor’s appointments (people don’t understand why we don’t stay local) and they give me a skeptical look … I shove my right arm in their face as proof that I indeed saw doctors and they tortured me as well!

That’s about all for now. I will right more in a bit. Kathryn wrote a funny story about our day of bugs and I’ll copy that into my blog too.