My Life Is Weird: Episode 5

One day in El Salvador I was sick. About half of my team had the blessing of picking up some sort of intestinal bacteria, and then Joy so sweetly passed me her cough, so I was down for the count. I was so sick that I decided to stay home from ministry, which would have been no big deal except that I was our team’s translator. But my teammates assured me that I didn’t need to feel guilty for not coming and told me that they had learned enough Spanish in five months to handle the door to door evangelism that we had planned to do. So I spent the day in bed trying to sleep off my various ailments. Later that afternoon they returned home and came straight to my room to check on me. I immediately wanted to know how the day had gone and how their Spanish had fared. They all kind of looked sheepishly at each other so I demanded to know what they had said. “Emily, how do you say sin in Spanish?” one of them asked. “Pecado,” I replied…”Why, what did you say?” “What does pescado mean?” they asked me. “That means fish!” I said. “Well…then there’s a good chance that we might have told a woman that God will forgive all of her fish.” My life is weird.

One night in Tanzania I looked down at my skin and tried to count my bug bites. The total would have been too depressing so I stopped counting. It occurred to me that my mosquito net wasn’t very effective. I began to examine it to see why that was and I discovered that it was more holes than net. I was getting eaten alive in a country full of malaria. It’s only by God’s protection that I never came down with it! My life is weird.

The failed net…that wasn’t keeping anything out!

One day in Thailand Joy took me to the hospital. In an incident unrelated to the time in El Salvador, I was sick again. But this time it had been going on for almost a month. Many of us rafted the Nile River in Uganda and subsequently swallowed about a gallon of parasite water. So of course we got sick. But for most people that happened in Nairobi at debrief within a very close proximity to a reputable tropical disease clinic. For me that happened in Tanzania with only a local “hospital” to help me out. Their help consisted of some unlabeled white, powdery “tablets” that did absolutely nothing. Then I got vertigo from the ferry ride back from Zanzibar, so by the time we made it back to Bangkok it was time for a hospital visit. We were there for about two hours getting me tested for various things, and when the doctor finally called me back to read me the test results she had some interesting explanations for my ailments. After explaining that I was chronically ill and trying unsuccessfully to admit me for further testing, she told me that she thought the stress of traveling was at the root of my sickness. After eight months of constant travel my body just randomly starts to rebel…right. Once I finally convinced her to give me parasite medicine, I went back out to get Joy so we could leave. But no, she had a better plan. It turned out Joy had discovered that the hospital had free wifi that actually worked (an incredibly rare find for World Racers) so we decided to stay and take advantage of it. We may or may not have just sat in the waiting area like we were awaiting test results and “borrowed” the hospital’s internet until our blogs and Facebook pages were sufficiently updated. World Racers will go out of our way to get Internet! My life is weird. 

Yes, that does say that the estimated duration of that download is “infinity,” so before you judge us for “borrowing” some hospital Internet, just imagine trying to post blogs, pictures, and videos with Internet like that!

One day in Laos we visited a Buddhist temple so that we could pray over it and I could film some footage for the video I was making to promote the ministry we were working with. We spent awhile there just watching the young monks decorate for the upcoming festival and taking pictures as we prayer walked. Then we decided to go inside one of the temple buildings to watch the service that was taking place. As we removed our shoes and sat in the back, our contact noticed something strange. Near the front of the room there was a large glass box, and inside the box was a lifelike wax statue of a monk with his orange robes on. She couldn’t take her eyes off of it, and half an hour later when we finally stepped outside the temple she exclaimed, “How did that monk stay so still?” We didn’t know which monk she meant. “The one in the box!” she said. We tried to explain to her that he was just a wax figure, not real, but she wouldn’t believe us. She proceeded to call over a few of the young monks who were learning English and try to get them to explain to her why the monk was trapped in the box. They didn’t understand enough English to answer her questions, but they certainly had a lively and entertaining conversation about it. We kept insisting that there were no air holes and that he wasn’t really alive, but that just left her thinking they had put a dead stuffed monk in a glass box inside the temple. Ah, language barriers. My life is weird.

One day in Laos we went on a tour of some local tribal villages and took a prayer float down the river to pray over it before the full moon festival that night. On our way to the river we stopped in at a local Buddhist temple to see what female monks were like. As we walked toward the temple a young woman passed us and we all stopped to see what her shirt said. It had a big Campbell’s Soup looking can on the front, but on the part that should have said Chicken Noodle or Tomato, it said “Kid Inside.” We realized that instead of Campbell’s, her shirt said Canibal’s Soup. Sometimes globalization is a bad thing. My life is weird.

One day in Thailand I ran out of toothpaste. I went down to the conveniently located 7 Eleven to restock, but of course all the labels were only printed in Thai. So I relied on pictures. I bought a tube of toothpaste that had what I thought was a mint leaf on it and headed back to the base. When I got there I went to brush my teeth, but as soon as the toothpaste touched my tongue I began gagging and spitting it out as fast as I could without actually letting any of the tap water touch my tongue. Once I finally got the taste out of my mouth by borrowing some real mint toothpaste and frantically chewing a few pieces of gum, I set out to investigate this death toothpaste I had purchased. It turned out to be fish oil flavored, and that “mint leaf” was some sort of herb that is commonly known to go with fish. Fish flavored toothpaste? Only in Asia. My life is weird. And also sometimes gross.

One day in Thailand Tiffany and I went to an ice cream shop while we waited for the rest of our group to finish getting what they needed from the grocery store. We always joke about how Tiffany, who is really part Filipino, part Spanish, and part American, is commonly mistaken for almost any nationality. She is very “multifunctional,” as I once described her, and she can fit in almost anywhere. As we sat down at the table, the waitress walked up and handed us menus. We looked down and started laughing when we realized that she had given me and English menu and Tiffany a Thai menu. The streak of ethnic confusion continues! My life is weird. 

Tiffany saluting the American flag they put in her sundae once they realized that she doesn’t speak Thai.

One day in Cambodia we were teaching English class as usual, and we decided it would be fun to play 20 Questions with some of the older conversation students. Brent decided to go first, and he stood at the white board thinking of an item. After almost all of the guesses had been used up, a female student raised her hand and asked, “Is it something I have on my face?” Brent told her yes, it was. After all the questions had been used and no one guessed the correct answer, Brent revealed that he had been thinking of his beard hair. This produced an uproar among the students who demanded to know how beard hair could be growing on the face of a female student. Poor Brent fumbled for words and eventually told her in front of the entire class that she did in fact have some “peach fuzz” growing on her face. Which, I still maintain, is not the same as beard hair. My life is weird.

One night in Cambodia we were staying in a hotel in Phnom Penh. I went down to the lobby to use the free internet. After I had been down there for a couple hours Skyping people and catching up on things back home, the lobby had emptied out, and I realized that all the Cambodian women who worked the night shift were sitting around watching me. I wasn’t doing anything remotely fascinating, but that’s just how life on the World Race is sometimes…people watch you exist for no reason. Eventually one of the women came over and tried to talk to me in Khmer and a tiny bit of English. She asked me my name, and when I told her she started laughing and yelled it over to the other women. I’m not sure what she thought I said, but whatever she heard is apparently funny in Khmer because they all cracked up. A few weeks later our entire squad was back at the same hotel, and one night I came in late and the same women were working. I walked up to the desk to ask for my key and they immediately burst out laughing and said their version of my name to me excitedly. I tried to ask them what my name meant in Khmer, but the closest that our game of charades got me was possibly “pale and Chinese.” So apparently they either thought I was pale and Chinese, or Emily means something similar in Khmer. Either way I was a hit in that hotel! My life is weird.