I'm 26 and Still Here

So yesterday was my birthday. What did I get? Another huge staph infection – this time on my thigh so I can’t walk right – and an allergy to mangoes, which is pretty much the ONLY redeeming factor of hot season.

The only good thing is that this morning when I was taking my bath, I looked at my staph infection and it had come to this huge purple blister of a head. Which promptly popped as I was bathing. Don’t read any further if you’re easily grossed out. So I squeezed out as much pus (this pus was more like sludgy blood than pus) as I could, then went inside and did the hot compress thing a few times, then bandaged it up with a gauze pad and tape, which I then covered with a head wrap tied around my leg so that when I walk there’s some padding. So it’s now slowly draining into the gauze. Why is this a good thing? You might ask. Well, it means that it’s draining on it’s own and I won’t have to go back to Clinique Pasteur and endure another torture session – this time much more embarrassing, BTW, considering the location of this infection. So hopefully with regular bandage changings, triple antibiotic, erithromicin (oral anti-biotic) and hot compresses, it’ll just go away without surgery – WIN!

So mango allergy. I’d just started eating mangoes again a few days ago after I got back because we are in mango season swing. In Guinea, I used to eat mangoes with a knife. Here I just do what the locals do and bite the skin, peeling the skin off strip by strip with my teeth, and then plunging mouth first into the fruit. I started to get an itchy red rash around my mouth and I was like WTF. At first I thought it was heat rash. But then it dawned on me – mango allergy! Awesome. A lot of volunteers have it. Some can’t eat mangoes at all. Others are just allergic to the skins/sap. I think I am a skin/sap allergy person so if I start eating them with a knife again I should probably be ok. I’m holding off on mangoes for a few days until my rash goes away to be sure that’s what it was, then I’ll start eating again with a knife and see how it goes. It would SUCK to be 100% allergic to them as opposed to just skin/sap. So cross your fingers for me.

In other news, Magellan is officially a “she” and she eats a lot more than she used to! She stays inside at night while I sleep outside. I hope she spends her evenings killing wayward mice and cockroaches, but who knows.

Oh yeah, remember that time I said it wasn’t that hot so I was going to try to sleep inside? EPIC FAIL. I woke up in a swimming pool of my own sweat about midnight and had to get up and pitch my tent in the middle of the night. But then I slept pretty well once I was outside. Drissa said it’s gonna be like this until June. I’m gonna need a massage when this is over.

The puppy sometimes sleeps with me outside my tent. But then when he hears something he barks and wakes me up. Apparently it is Oumarri’s job to see what the dogs bark about when they go off. Because every time the dogs bark, Oumarri gets up with his flashlight and goes and looks out into the field and into the animal pens. Apparently that is the role of the dogs: to tell the family when there’s something moving around that’s unusual at night – something that could potentially hurt one of the animals.

Today when I woke up there was a tiny baby donkey staring into my tent at me. I was like, “good morning.” Then he went away. I <3 baby donkeys.

Oh yeah, Adama called me yesterday and said the funding for my latrine project had been approved. Yay! He said he didn’t know when the money would actually be there yet but the good news is that the latrines will get built before rainy season. Now to see if I can get the pump funding in time, too!

Well, I think that’s all from the home front. By my birthday next year (27 – one step closer to 30!! But I decided my thirties are gonna be a rockin decade so I ain’t that distraught over it) I should be back in LA. But you never know. Shit happens.