Excuse me for a moment while I rinse off the manure

Hope you are all doing swell on the other side of the world! As for me, I had my first run in with illness 🙁 Yesterday we traveled about an hour to a ministry site to make some vermi food. Vermi bins are home to African night crawlers (worms) and these worms make organic fertilizer for their farms. The people here are taught how to grow their own vegetables and fruit. The food is made up of carabao (philippino water buffalo 🙂 manure which has been dried. It didn’t look very dry to me. I just had to keep telling myself it was dirt! It also consisted of banana tree trunk, rice straw, and some sort leaves that we chopped up like cilantro. These were all mixed together and then we added water. Don’t worry…that’s not what made me sick. I thought I just had a bad case of motion sickness because I get motion sickness every time we travel 🙁 I started getting these stomach cramps on the way home from our site. Once we got home, I was going to the bathroom every thirty minutes! For the rest of the entire night, the longest I slept at any one time was an hour. Most of the time I was in the bathroom every 30-45 minutes. I never threw up though which I guess was a good thing. We took my temperature before going to bed and it was 99.9. For me, that’s already a decent fever because my normal body temperature is lower than 98.6. By midnight my temperature was up to 101.5.

 

My roommate and I decided to wake up one of the guys so we could call the doctor. We already had his number because one of my other teammates had been treated for a parasite that same morning. The doctor is available 24/7 but we got no answer. My two teammates decided the only thing left that we could actually do is pray. My temperature never got any higher! I was still in the bathroom every thirty minutes though. Still had a headache, still was freezing, and my body still ached. They gave me some medicine this morning which seemed to help! I took medicine at 7 am and did not have to go the bathroom until 11:30 yay!! I’ve also slept most of today. Please pray for the health of my team and other teams.  I’ve read that many other racers from the september squad are also ill. My body still is achy and I’ve got a bit of a headache. Our ministry contacts gave us the day off so we could rest. I think mostly they gave us the day off becuase it rained so much and it’s hard to build a house in the rain. We were still thankful for the rest though. Other than that things here are still going good. We are excited to get to build more on the duplexes. Please pray that it doesn’t keep raining though because the rain keeps us from working.