Week Three: Food Poisoning--the Nile Virus? :)

Hey everyone! I hope you all are doing well. I am doing really well now. This weekend we took an amazing trip to a town called Jinja. It is right on Lake Victoria, which is the source of the Nile River. So we got to take several really cool tours around the town, and a boatride on the lake to the source of the Nile. It was so beautiful!

The sad thing was I got really sick with food poisoning on the way home on Sunday--so I spent 1.5 hours on the bus puking my guts out, and continued puking until 8-9 pm on Sunday night. Brooke, one of my leaders, called Mama Joyce to let her know I was really sick and that Americans prefer to be left alone when they are sick. That lasted about an hour and a half, and then Mama Joyce just couldn't resist. The African culture is very different. Here, when someone is sick, it is very rude and offensive to ignore them. Instead, you should do everything you can do to help them and wait on them. They have no qualms about seeing sick people or being seen when they are sick--they expect people to help them when they are ill and they do the same thing for others. It is the difference between the individualistic culture and the communal culture. I explained to Mama Joyce how we hate being seen sick because it is embarrassing--we don't like being seen at our worst. And we don't like to feel like a burden on other people, so we hate to see people take so much time to help us. She said that is not the way in Africa. And she said she tried to stay away, but she is a mother and it's not natural for her to leave a sick child alone. I appreciated the help. I don't really know how to be sick here. Everything is so different. Our toilets are 50 feet or so outside of the house. I tried a couple of times to run to the outhouse from my bedroom, carrying the basin I was puking in, but that didn't work so much. So eventually I just sat outside for a while. Then Mama Joyce came and explained to me that if I was "diareteting" they had a bucket inside I could use. So while that felt very strange and embarrassing to me, she assured me "that's how we do it" so I spent the rest of the evening sitting on one bucket and puking into another. I'm sure it was a sad picture, but I didn't care so much at the time.

Praise God I am feeling much better today. Yesterday I was still a bit queasy and skipped lunch, but I have eaten today and felt much better overall. One day of food poisoning was mild compared to some of the sicknesses I could catch here, so I suppose I'll count my blessings.

This week is going to be a bit crazy at school. I feel like American universities tend to push all of the projects and papers to the end of the semester, but in Uganda they just do them throughout. So I am a bit stressed. This week I have two long ournal entries due, and a huge paper/project due (all of this on Thursday/Friday) and I had a rough start being sick this weekend and traveliing--not much time for homework! So please pray that I am able to finish all of the assignments on time and without too much stress.

Otherwise, the weeks are flying by so far and I am really enjpying it here still. I am building better relationships with my fellow American students and beginning to find Ugandan friends as well. I am definitely becoming more a part of my host family and thinking what a blessing it is to have the opportunity to have a family here. How cool to be a genuine member of an African family! I look forward to going home from campus every night and hanging out with Mama Joyce and various other host relatives.

Well, I have to head home now actually. I have a mass amount of laundry that isn't going to do itself. I have clean underwear...but no skirts, really. So unless I want to go to class in my underwear tomorrow...looks like I get to spend some quality time with the washing basin this afternoon.