photo by Carlo Ricci
Caution: Explicit material. Maybe don't read this one if you easily get queasy or don't want to read about vomiting and other nasties.In February, I got typhoid fever. The illness and recovery lasted three weeks, and all in all it was the worst sickness of my life (though I've had worse nights of terrible fevers, sore throats, and stomach bugs before). I'm one of about four people I've known at PSF who have gotten typhoid, and every one of us was vaccinated prior to traveling.It started out with me just feeling generally tired, achy, and just plain sick. I randomly got stomach cramps, but I didn't think anything of it. I do live in Pisco after all, where volunteers reguarly get what we call "Pisco Belly," suffering from an upset stomach for days on end. I went camping on the beach in the Paracas National Park, as we often do, although I really didn't want to. That night, I felt terrible. My head pounded, my stomach cramped up, and my back was tense and achy from being bent over from the stomach pain. Luckily, a friend gave me a strong painkiller and I was able to eat dinner that night.Coming home from Paracas, I cleaned up my camping gear and went to bed at about 5pm. The next day I explained my illness to a friend who suggested that it sounded like typhoid. I checked out my symptoms to what it said online and pretty much everything checked out: achy muscles, stomach cramps (that actually brought me to tears once or twice), fever, cough, frontal headache, exhaustion. I went in for testing that day. Testing meant going to the main plaza (Plaza de Armas), going up a narrow stairway off the street into a narrow hallway with a tiny waiting room and a door to a clinic the size of a bedroom. A nurse took my name, took blood from my arm for the typhoid test, and gave me a cup for a stool sample (to test for other parasites). The stool sample cup, no exaggeration, was the size of a condiment to-go cup you would get from a restaurant. Maybe an inch deep and 2 inches across. I'm not sure how I did it, but I got the sample without making a mess. The one thing they did not provide for me was a bathroom. I had to go to a nearby restaurant to get my sample. How nice.
I went back that afternoon for the results. I was negative for parasites, but positive for one of the types of typhoid. I'm still not sure what it means, but there were two types, "H" and "O" and I was positive for one of the two. They told me to take my results to a doctor. That was Valentine's Day, and not the happiest one I can remember having.The next morning, I had a Spanish-speaking friend, Navin, take me to the clinic. For only 20 soles (about 7 dollars), I was able to speak to a doctor (at least I think she was a doctor). I told her what was wrong and showed her my results, and she put me on two weeks of antibiotics three times a day, with food. She asked me a few questions, like if I eat street food or, oddly, condiments?! I left slightly confused by that, but a bit relieved that I would be getting relief from my symptoms.When I started the antibiotics, the side effects started immediately. I won't list them all, as some are quite personal, but at least I'll tell some of the interesting ones. For one, I was exhausted all the time. Walking up to my third-floor bedroom felt twice as hard and took twice as long as usual. I just laid in bed most of the day, relieved that I traveled with a laptop so I could have some entertainment. Another problem I was having is what they call "hairy tongue." My tongue did not look hairy or dark like the pictures I'd seen on the net, it just was constantly coated whitish, as if I'd gone to bed without brushing my teeth. And it tasted bad! I brushed my teeth at least three times a day, but the feeling came back so fast every time. It also affected my sense of smell. Most things smelled absolutely terrible, and this added to the nausea I felt most of the time. When I would walk downstairs in the morning to get some breakfast, I couldn't stand the smell of the scrambled eggs. I also couldn't eat the buttered rolls I normally ate for breakfast because the idea of butter turned my stomach. The only thing I really wanted to eat was chocolate! One night I bought a bunch and was eating it all, so my friend Josh had to hide it from me in my own room!
Not only did smells make me nauseous, but my system was holding in gas and making me incredibly bloated, like I'd just eaten a Thanksgiving dinner (or two). I didn't even have room for food! This didn't help the nausea at all. Most meals I couldn't eat, so I just ate a few soda crackers so that I could take the antibiotics with food, like the doc instructed. After a week of misery and two bouts of vomiting, my Spanish-speaking friend Louisa took me back to the doctor to request a change in medication. She said she could not change the medication - I had to take these ones because typhoid is a serious illness and requires strong antibiotics. She was able though, to give me some gas relief tabs that tasted really nice and relieved a bit of the bloating. I asked her if there were foods I should be avoiding, and she said I must have forgotten all she had told me! No condiments (that basically meant spicy sauces), and I should only eat certain fruits, rice, vegetables, and vegetable soup. Must have forgotten...yeah right. I can understand enough Spanish to know that she didn't mention any of this in my first visit. Either way, I did feel much better when I stuck to this diet. Things started to get better after this visit. I was still very tired, but one weekend toward the end, I had the energy to camp in Paracas again. The group was just too awesome to miss this one! I had a great weekend and was only queasy once. I came back to PSF feeling alright. But then I made the mistake of straying from my diet. On Tuesday morning, my last day of antibiotics (only had to take a breakfast and a lunch pill!), I ate chocolate cereal with yogurt. I could barely help it at this point, I was craving chocolate so much! I've never felt such strong cravings! Along with my bloated stomach, my friends joked that I wasn't sick, just pregnant. Very funny. Anyway, for lunch that day, I had some fried stingray with rice and beans (normal Peruvian food). HUGE mistake. That afternoon my stomach started acting up as I was being jostled around in the work truck, so I went straight home and back to bed to rest. Very soon after I was up and in the bathroom, sick. I was in and out of the bathroom vomiting for an hour and a half. It was so violent, the blood vessels around my eyes broke and I had little red dots all over and under my eyelids. I also was crying out of the discomfort, so my eyes puffed up and I looked a mess. Luckily, after one of my trips to the bathroom, my friend Josh (on the right in the photo below) noticed me and ran up the stairs to the rescue. He held me for a long time, reminding me that I had no more pills to take; it was all over. Then I curled up on Karine's bottom bunk and he read random bits out of one of her books. He also did the cleaning duty I had signed up for that morning - DISHCO, which is doing the dinner dishes (one of the biggest cleaning jobs you can sign up for). I couldn't have asked for a better friend!I couldn't eat that night, which was a shame because Mel made pizza for dinner. I went right to bed after I was done being sick, and my eyes stayed puffy into the next morning. The entire next day I was too tired to work, so I spent one last day of laying in bed. Finally, the next day, one day short of three weeks of being sick, I finally felt better. Then the next day I had three ice creams, all bought by my friend Jack (on the left in the photo), because he felt sorry that I couldn't eat ice cream for three weeks without getting nauseous. He also bought us TWO bottles of my favorite wine to share! We had this wonderful sit-down meal at PSF that night, where four of the volunteers cooked an amazing AMAZING meal and served it to us at our tables. Complete with candles and apple cobbler with homemade custard for desert. Then the DISHCO crew (dishes/disco) put on some amazing tunes and we all danced in the kitchen, probably making it more dirty than it was before! It was a riot! I got a little tipsy and ate so much food I felt like I was going to explode! It felt amazing to be able to eat and drink again, to have energy, and to be with incredibly sweet and caring friends. It was one of the best days of my life.
It's now been two months since I left for Peru. I'm still having a good time and I'm not ready to go quite yet, but I can feel that I need a break from PSF. Life in the house is hectic, stressful, crazy, and generally a lot of fun! I know I need more time to myself, but when I'm up in my room hanging out, I can hear the laughter of people in the courtyard, drinking beer around the fire, and I always have to come out.Last week was a very stressful week. One of the hotels that supplies us with quite a bit of used vegetable oil was too busy to give us oil (twice!), and we skipped a week of going to the steel factory that also gives us a lot of oil. We were using more oil than we were producing and my stores were getting low. Then the one Peace Corps worker here in Pisco came by to see how much biodiesel he could get for the fishermen here, who get the fuel as a loan which they will pay back in a few months when their catch comes in. I couldn't actually give him any, and he was bugging me about getting more in a week...but I didn't even have enough raw oil to make more biodiesel! Luckily, the week turned out great because a new Burner girl named Page showed up who is interested in the project and also is fluent in Spanish! She called many places for me and has been running around town with me trying to find more. She even found a new culinary school just down the road and we're working on getting them as a supplier (will find out tomorrow - fingers are crossed!). All in all though, the week turned out okay. I got enough oil from places to turn out one batch that is washing at the moment, and tomorrow I'll start another. If they are good, I'll be all set.On top of that good luck, today Page and I were walking around the main plaza trying to find more sources of oil, when this Peruvian man started talking to us. He asked first if we were PSF volunteers, then mentioned he is friends with Harold and Carolina (Harold is the PSF president and his sister, Carolina, is the house manager). He then said that he used to drive around with the old biodiesel volunteers to restaurants to get oil, and that he would do that for us for free! He said he's a volunteer too. How nice! So we got into his tuk-tuk and we stopped by a couple of places and talked to people. How awesome is that!?In other news, my roommate Karine and I have become the new PSF barbers. I've probably done 5 or 6 men's haircuts/trims so far, and I have a bit of a waiting list now! I think though that from now on, a haircut is going to cost 10 soles (about $3.50) and maybe a beer. The beer for me to drink during the cut, and the 10 soles for the new jackhammer fund that PSF has started since our jackhammer broke and we desperately need a new one. I think I've been getting pretty good at cutting hair...but I really wouldn't want to do it for a living! I'd rather be a colorist, ha!
I like it here, but it really depends on the day and time of day you ask me. Some people here suck, and some are amazingly awesome. Sometimes I get stressed out driving the truck around all day, trying to get groups to their jobs, finding the places, and trying to get their quickly without smashing into a tuk-tuk or hitting a pedestrian that just walks out in front of traffic without looking. Sometimes I don't sleep well because it's hot and all night I can hear honking, huge trucks roaring by, and damned loud roosters crowing, so I get up in the morning tired and uninspired. And some days you talk to a local and have an amazing experience trying to sort through your broken Spanish and their broken English, but in the end you all just laugh a lot. Some days I forget I'm in Peru.
It's been six weeks now that I've been at Pisco Sin Fronteras. I love it here. Every day I am doing something new and exciting, or meeting someone new and exciting. Of course it's very sad when friends leave... you wonder if you'll ever see them again. But amazingly, more awesome people come every day. I can't complain a bit!Not long after I started learning to make bio-diesel here, the guy who was teaching me left. So I took over as bio-diesel manager. In this project I've worked on making safety guides, editing our bio-diesel manual, writing the trouble-shooting guide and fixing other odds and ends. I also get to drive out to Paracas where there are hotels like Hilton and I pick up their used vegetable oil to make bio-diesel. We use the bio-diesel to run our work truck (on b100 - pure bio-diesel - not a blend) and we also loan it to the fishermen nearby who will pay us for it when their catch comes in around June. In the long term, I hope to help streamline the process, find more good oil sources, and ready PSF for bio-diesel production for other customers. It's a bit tough to do this stuff without knowing Spanish well, but I do get help from other volunteers here.I also have started a bio-diesel class here. There are many volunteers here who want to learn how to make bio-diesel. Thing is, when I make it I really don't need a lot of help, so other volunteers are usually out on site working when I make a batch. I had my first class last week, which I feel went well, but could have gone better. Now that I know what kinds of questions people were asking, I can do more research and be better prepared for the next one. I was shocked at how many people showed up - there were probably 30 people watching! I was hoping for a smaller class, where we could just all fit inside the bio-shack and just talk about how things worked. Maybe next time (fingers crossed).
It's been such a busy, exciting week I haven't had time to write my blog! Okay, so it's been a week and a half, but go easy on me, the internet's been down for a couple of days.I flew into Peru and stayed the night in Lima before taking the four-hour bus ride down to Pisco. I was a bit worried as we drove through sand dunes and desolate desert villages. I was right to be worried. Pisco is a desert town. I'm used to this, sure, but I've never been in a desert that's so barren. They have a few trees and cactus planted about, but this town makes Mesa seem like a rain forest.
I went straight to the casa de voluntarios and headquarters of Pisco Sin Fronteras (PSF). I got set up in a hostel-style room with three other girls, nicknamed the Powder Room. I live on the top of a creaky wooden bunk bed and sleep on a mattress made of hay. I tried to soften it a bit by sleeping on top of a leftover sleeping bag, thin camping mat, and my fuzzy blanket. It helps slightly, but my limbs still fall asleep often because there's no cushioning to give them room when I lay on my side. I have actually made my lower bunk-mate think there's an earthquake going on when I've climbed down from my bed. There's a beam above my head that is where I need to take cover under if I can't get out of the house and an earthquake happens. I'm actually really excited for an earthquake to happen, just so I can feel what that feels like, but I really hope it doesn't happen when I'm up in my bunk bed!Every morning we get up for breakfast at about 7:30. It's usually oatmeal, fruit salad, scrambled eggs with veggies, rolls with jam, and tea. Sometimes the volunteers who choose to make breakfast will change it up (we got pancakes last week and they were GREAT), but it's generally this. At 8:30, we must be dressed for the day and ready to go, and at that time we gather outside for the morning meeting. The morning meeting serves as a platform for announcements, job placement, and hellos and goodbyes from volunteers who seem to be coming and going everyday. All the jobs are listed on a white board and people volunteer to clean various parts of the house, make dinner or breakfast, or go to a job site. Many people go to the same job site the whole time because they like the family or just get really invested in the work they're doing. Jobs include helping out at the ludoteca (like a free, voluntary school for kids who aren't at public school), helping build houses or pour concrete slabs, work on the earth-bag construction community center, gathering scrap wood from the gigantic metal factory and de-nailing it, or admin type jobs (I think you have to apply for those).
My first day I helped make dinner. This is an all-day job! First we spent some time picking up the ingredients at the market. The market is a huge maze of stalls with people selling everything from toys to fresh chicken feet to underwear. We had to go to multiple little stalls to get our veggies, cheese, spices, chicken, and oil. Back at the house we chopped veggies (after soaking them in bleach water) and fried up eggplant and chicken to make eggplant and chicken parmeasan. There's always a head count at the morning meeting to see how many hippies and monsters we have (vegetarians and non) so the cooks know how much of what to cook. I LOVE this! There are usually quite a few vegetarians too, though many who come to South America take up meat again because it's so difficult to eat here otherwise. I personally have started eating eggs again since we have them almost daily at breakfast, and I've been picking meat out of dishes often because it's either that or starve (and I turn into the Hulk when I'm hungry).
The next day I went to the largest steel factory in Peru, Aceros Arequipa. There, past the factory and through dunes, is a slab of concrete with piles of scrap wood and pallets. The company lets us sift through those and some old tarps and take what we can use, then trucks it back to the wood yard we use across the street from the volunteer house. This job doesn't take all day, but it is quite hard. I was looking forward to the early day, but when we got back, we were recruited to help out with a concrete pour. This is tough and takes many people - people to shovel gravel and sand into the mixer, to gather water, and to pour buckets into wooden troughs to make foundations and columns in buildings we make. Not incredibly fun.
Over my first weekend I went beach camping with about twenty other volunteers. We borrowed some poles, rope, and tarps to make one long tent to sleep in. It was very beautiful - a nice change of scenery from the sad, dusty desolation of Pisco. We had a campfire at night and stayed up drinking, then relaxed the next day, making a big sand castle and also catching crabs and mussels for dinner. While gathering crabs we found lots of little blue and purple crabs under the rocks which were very pretty! Also, walking along the rocky shore, a pod of dolphins dropped by to check us out! It was amazing!
The start of my second work-week was a very snotty, sniffly one. And just at the end of the week, when my sniffles were subsiding, I got the dreaded "Pisco belly." People generally just get an upset stomach and get dehydrated here, most likely from the poor water quality and eating foods that may have been washed or grown in it. People say there's fecal matter in the water because of the earthquake and the lack of a decent sewage system. We boil water for at least ten minutes before using it to cook, and all dishes and vegetables get at least a minute in water with a bit of bleach in it. But most of us still get Pisco belly. I didn't work Friday because of it and got to learn about the joys of delicious re-hydration salts. Yum!The week was cool though because I got to work on the earth-bag community center, then finally on the bio-diesel system. We ran my first batch this weekend. Lots of little issues and things to fix! The methanol and lye solution that we mix with filtered veggie oil tends to crystallize in the pipes and block up the works, so we had a bit of cleaning to do due to that. Last night we mixed the meth oxide with the hot veggie oil and then let it settle overnight. Today, we have to dump the remainder, glycerol, and send the newly made bio-diesel into a series of water washes. The oil sits on top of water and the grit and crap settles into the water. Then it has to go to dry in another tank before it's done. But first we have to test samples of it to make sure most of the glycerol has been separated out.
Days we work hard and nights we sit around a camp fire and drink beer and eat cake (bought from the "cake lady" around the corner who has cakes, beer, water, and can do our laundry).
Alright! I am happy to say I have a plan. It's been a strange few months being home. I started out thinking I was going to leave in September with Tanya, but I'm ending up leaving in December solo. Being home has been awesome and I'm going to be sad to leave. I think maybe I stayed too long, making it harder to leave (I love my friends too much). This will be good though. Finally doing some volunteer work which I've been wanting to get into since before I left for Korea (I had considered Peace Corps back then).Oh! You're probably wondering what I'm doing! Well, in all my searching and planning I'd almost forgotten about Burners Without Borders. They are a group of burners (those who attend Burning Man), who started their group in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. They went down there and just started cleaning up. Then more burners came. Soon they were an organized group and everyone lived happily ever after, cleaning up after storms around the world. Really though, they've also gone to Haiti and Peru to help out. I'll be going to Pisco, Peru, where BWB has been and left in their wake a group called Pisco Sin Fronteras (in English, Pisco Without Borders). This group is still there and works with the locals to clean up the environment and construct new homes after the 2007 earthquake, and also to help teach kids English and paint murals in kid's spaces. They also have a bio-diesel program to help fund the organization. I'll be going down there to join them on December 7th and I don't know how long I'll stay. We'll see how awesome it is or how long I can stand it!I'm really looking forward to meeting a lot of other foreign travelers, Peruvian locals, also learning Spanish and traveling to other destinations in South America, like Machu Picchu and Angels Falls. Going to be quite the journey!
As you may have noticed, my travel plans have changed considerably! I went from planning to come home, go to Burning Man, visit friends and family, then head to Central and South America with Tanya to still being here, working, and planning the trip solo. Life happened to Tanya so she's going to stay in Beijing to work and live a while longer. This leaves me going south alone with scares the crap out of me!Tanya and I were going to just head down to the beach to relax a while before doing any work or volunteering. We could couch-surf and just figure it out as we went. This doesn't work for me though. I'm fine traveling alone, but I think for extended periods without a buddy I would get bored. Not to mention how much more dangerous it would be! So I want to find a more structured travel plan. I've been looking at taking intensive Spanish courses, maybe surf lessons, joining up with a volunteer organization, or just finding work in Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile...wherever! I want to see it all anyway.I'm getting close to having a solid plan, but I won't disclose details quite yet. I'm getting very excited about leaving, but I'm having so much fun here too! I've been catching up with old friends, making new ones, and just having a great time. I've been working for my old boss, Chris, at the welding shop. We got the Phoenix Zoo as our big client this time, and since I've been back I've worked on a reptile exhibit, the new koala exhibit, tore down and rebuilt the bear fence, and am about to install HUGE baboon/mandril cages to their inside area. These things get rusted out and need to be replaced. It's nice working at the zoo (when the weather's nice). There are monkeys that sing in the morning and plenty of other animal noises to keep us entertained. Sometimes we have strange birds watching us, like the peacocks that roam freely about the zoo, or the vultures that watched me work on the reptile area (a little creepy).I love being home, but I'm antsy to get moving again!
photo by Carlo Ricci
