Have I really not written a substantial post since the middle of January? That seems like a very long time. Maybe I haven’t had a lot of report. I got over my dark time and have been increasingly excited about the remaining year and a half (er, year and a few months) I have left. IST has been a good chance to make friends with other volunteers, and since I don’t have my own stage in this country, being adopted by another stage is very nice. Volunteers are the biggest source of support in country and not having a support network is rough.
The training itself has been okay. In typical Peace Corps fashion, much of it seems spent on trying to make sessions interactive by having us come up with definitions for terms like “food security”. Unfortunately, we all know what food security is, have studied and read about it for not insignificant amounts of time, and are generally bored by spending an hour discussing a broad overview of food security. What we would like instead is an in depth look at what projects successfully helped with food security and how they can be best implemented in our sites. This is just an example, but it applies to nearly all of the other topics we have covered during IST as well.
Anyway, to sum up, that’s what has been going on for the past few weeks. We are in the final days of IST now, and I am actually in Niamey today because I have a staff infection on my face. I wish I had my camera so I could take a picture of how giant my upper lip is, but it is at the training site. Here is what happened:
Sunday I shaved. Not normally a dangerous activity, but this time it was. I spent Sunday night wondering why my lip hurt, and woke up Monday morning with what I thought was just a big pimple where my mustache was the day before. I popped it, and it was pretty gross, but I thought perhaps that was the end of it and the pain would go away. Instead my upper lip began to swell like crazy, and I spent all of yesterday trying to warm compress it and on antibiotics, increasing dosage as it refused to do anything. By last night my lip was ridiculous, and my nose had begun to hurt as well. This morning I woke up with more puss and a larger lip, and by this afternoon I was back in Niamey being injected with industrial strength antibiotics (and fainting from the IV).
The two thoughts in my head during this whole thing have been: “I hope they don’t have to cut me,” and “Will I look like a Simpson’s character for the rest of my life?” Anyway, I am not in bad spirits, just a little annoyed. These things always come at awkward times, but at least I look hilarious.
So, God willing, the swelling will be down by tonight, I will get another injection tomorrow morning, and be back at training tomorrow afternoon. The medical staff here are really nice and helpful. Anyway, its been fun. Hopefully its over and I will back to normal size tomorrow.
UPDATE: It is noon on Thursday and the swelling is down, though not nearly gone. My arm is in a lot of pain from the IVs, but otherwise I am doing well. The infection seems to be going away nicely. I will finish out treatment with amoxicillin for 8 days, and I should be able to leave the med unit tonight to spend time with volunteers at the hostel.
