When Life Gives You Lemons – This Ain’t No Vacation

It’s month ten and we are in Guatemala in fabulous living conditions…seriously. I remember a day during month one in the Philippines when the water went out in Manila. I sent panicked emails to family and friends asking them to pray. If only I had known how often that would happen throughout the year, or what it would be like to haul water from a well to bathe in. I would have relaxed a bit. So now we’re in month ten and the electricity/water goes off often. The other night we were sitting in the house feeling like it was completely ironic that there was a deluge going on outside when we couldn’t get water to come out of the faucet. And then something clicked and we grabbed our towels and shampoo and went out to suds up in the rain, much to our neighbors shock. What a moment, 13 world racers laughing like little kids all drenched and soapy in the Guatemalan rain. Did it make not having water worth it? Absolutely not…but it was a great way to make lemonade.

The other night I decided to ramp up my nightly Benadryl dosage to three pills. These days I prefer to be knocked out so I don’t notice that I’m sleeping on wooden slabs with a banana like curvature, and so I don’t wake up to whatever is crawling on me. I was out as soon as my head hit the wood and the next thing I new I was sitting straight up in bed obviously experiencing some kind of bodily revolt to the medicine. I was somewhere between absolute exhaustion and hallucination, which included not being able to open my eyes, profuse swetting, and the very good decision to take a few laps around the 10 by 6 foot room. If there had been any observers it probably would have looked like me turning in slow circles stumbling over clothes and packs…very odd. Possibly because of the spinning, the contents of my stomach, including the three pills, started to make their way back up. I stumbled to the bathroom and proceeded with the bend and gag routine. All the while, my eyes were closed. When I did decide to pry them open with my fingers, I noticed a “scorpion” crawling along the wall. Aghast, I got real close to make sure of what I was seeing. For some reason, the closer I got the less I could tell what I was actually looking at. If there was some kind of creature on the wall it probably thought I had lost my mind…which would have been close to the truth. After awhile I lost interest and headed back to the room to continue thrashing around in my wooden bed. From now on I’m keeping the dosage to two.