One more?

Just in case you've lost sleep over my last news, I'm on the last day of my malaria meds and I'm feeling great. I bummed around all weekend. It was the strangest thing though. I was diagnosed on Friday and was given 3 (enormous!) pills to take that day then a bag of (equally huge) pills to take for the following 4 days. Major symptoms of malaria are basically major fatigue and mild headaches. I don't know what was in those first pills I took, though because I'm pretty sure I slept about 2 hours from Friday morning to Saturday night. I felt like I was hopped up on something, so exhausted but my brain going a mile a minute. I even laid out in the sun on Saturday (at the pool) and I still couldn't sleep. I now sympathize with anyone who can't sleep at night. It's a horrible feeling! I was staring out the window waiting for the roosters to crow (the roosters by my house, by the way, are HORRIBLE and LOUD and always make everyone cranky for the rude alarm clock). I was up all day, and when I say up, I mean up. Like people on drugs must be up. Or at least lots and lots of coffee. It all caught up with me on Saturday night though.. I went to bed about 9:30 and woke up the next day about 8:30. Let me just tell you something, 11 hours of sleep is WONDERFUL!

Other than my weird sleep patterns, the malaria hasn't really been all that bad. I apparently caught it early enough. The only real side effect I've dealt with is lots and lots of sweating. Even when I'm not in the sun, even when I'm not moving, even when I'm in a freezing cold shower. It's a horrible feeling, I promise. (If you happen to be male, reading this, and there's a chance I might date you some day, I made this part up. It's all a joke...) I'm really not normally a very sweaty person, which has made this all the more distressing.

Fast forward to Tuesday (today)and I'm feeling much better and, if you must know, drier. It's hotter than heck here right now and it seems to be getting hotter. You know it's bad when the wind, which is usually a blessed vacation from the heat, is just as stifling. The walk down the road takes longer and longer as we've shifted our walking to strolling and strolling to ambling. I quite enjoy a good amble. The new volunteers got here Sunday and we have to tell them to stop walking like Europeans and to start walking like Africans. Africans are great amblers. It's an art really, you can't get to excited about your destination or else you get carried away, causing you to speed up and overheat. Slowly but surely the walk home from town has gotten longer and longer, but much more comfortable, due to my perfecting of the African Amble.

The bus that usually picks us up for school at 7:30 broke last week (or so they say. Word on the street is that he wanted more money and Mohommed -the guy in charge- won't pay him anymore. oooh juicy gossip is so nice). Anyway, since there were only a few volunteers left last week Mohammed took us up to the school himself. Now,we have more, so they arranged for a daladala (minibus/taxi thing) to take us. This means we have to leave at 7am to get to town by 7:30 to catch the daladala. Yeah 30 minutes earlier every day! More importantly, it means we have to wait for the daladala to remember us in teh afternoon. Yesterday it came at 4 (its supposed to come at 3:15). Today, they were doing construction on our road (by road I mean dirt path and by construction I mean they blocked it off with branches and 4 men were digging a trench with pic axes) and it never came. This meant that we had to go out the the main road (an actual one) and catch a public daladala. Not that I have anything against riding with the locals, but its less than a pleasant experience, especially if you're going more than 5 minutes (we had about 20. You know when you're waiting for an elevator and one comes but its crammed, so you wait for the next one? It's like that, but instead of an elevator its a bus that should fit 12 people and instead of waiting you just cram tighter. I believe there were about 18 people in when we boarded, and there were 9 of us. Needless to say it was quite the experience. I had it easy though. It was only 20 minutes and I had Jenny on my lap. Aoife was on one once for at least an hour with her head dangerously close to someone's crotch, Megan had a 6 hour with a kid in convulsions and Stuart had one with a 200 poiund woman on his lap. One can only hope I"ll have such an experience.

Anyway, life is good. I'm coming home with an arsenal of crazy stories you'll never believe.