#1 Last week we were traveling with two of our teams. After getting stuck in ridiculous traffic, we arrived to the “bus station” to catch our “luxury bus.” Scratch the bus station. We end up on the side of a busy road, standing in a circle to protect our bags from the dozens of street kids and curious passerby’s. Our departure time rolls around and rolls on by just like every bus that wasn’t ours blew us by. 2 hours later, we started getting creative. Andrew starts strumming on a guitar and Cassie starts playing the chords. Laura has an amazing voice and starts singing. It gets dark and starts to rain. I decide to join in and I don’t remember whose idea it was, but we started passing around a hat. By now we’ve drawn a pretty decent crowd. Busses are stopped in traffic and people are hanging out the windows staring at us. We sang everything from “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” to “Shelah” (dance included) to some Spanish impromptu sung by yours truly. We had people giving us bills out the bus windows. At one point a little girl off the street gave us 5 rupees. Okay…so we only made like 50 rupees… which is less than a dollar, but still. An hour later our bus that just screamed “luxury” (or more like you’re going to have to fight for your seat, be puked on midway and have to pee on the side of the road in front of everyone) showed up and we cleaned up the act. Not something I’ll soon forget. Pictures to come hopefully…maybe even a video
#2 (Once again, this is probably one of these blogs that is too much information and too gross to post, but oh well). This week Sarah, Ryan, and I had some serious stomach issues. My stomach has never been the same since moving overseas nearly 3 years ago, but I was dropping a lot of weight and decided to go to the hospital and get checked. We show up and it goes a little like this with our Nepali doctor:
Me: Lots of diarrhea.
So we get our tiny cups and try to give them a fecal sample. There is no toilet paper, so we split up sheets of notebook paper (which is better than receipts we’ve previously been using) and head to the toilet. Ryan and Sarah have no problems, but I seriously can’t go. I go back out defeated and Sarah and Ryan’s translucent cups of crap are just sitting on the table. Sick. They give me a peptalk and I walk determined back into the bathroom. After about 10 minutes of plyometrics and exercises, I finally am able to go a little bit. Not sure it’s enough, I walk dejectedly to the doctors’ table, where all the young male doctors are standing. I can’t make eye contact, but I start nervously laughing and ask if there is enough to test. Thankfully there is and I place my cup out in the open next to Ryan’s and Sarah’s. I stood there for maybe 3 seconds looking at the cups (sick, right?), just asking myself once again, when did this become okay? We walk out and did the 30 minute walk of shame back to the orphanage. Turns out Sarah’s okay, I had a parasite, and Ryan had some weird protozoa/amoeba thing. Yuck. There’s some glimpses of my life for you J. No pictures or video to come on this one 😉
