This is a Dysentisaster!

The health issues you face in a third world country like Ethiopia are slightly different than the ones you deal with in the U.S. Just a bit.

Coming here, I don’t think I really understood just how different they would be. Having a “jumbly-wumbly stomach” is a fairly common occurrence, so I thought nothing of not feeling so hot for a day, and even after sleeping fourteen hours, I’d woken up a couple weeks ago, took a cipro (the medicine I take every once in a while when my stomach is really not happy), and planned to sleep it off. Luckily, Alex, the man in charge here at SFEL, has a little more experience and wisdom in these affairs, and told me to get myself out of bed and on a the back of a motorbike on my way to the clinic to check and make sure it wasn’t anything more serious.

There’s nothing quite like walking into a medical clinic in a small town in southern Ethiopia and have everyone stare at the ferenji who only wants to be in bed and not have everything she’s consumed in the past two days  (you’re welcome for not getting more descriptive). After wandering around, mostly lost, trying to figure out what should be happening, I got the lovely diagnosis of amoebas, also known as dysentery.

After a quick trip to the pharmacy, where I picked up two different medicines, as well as some oral rehydration salts, I headed back home, on the back of a different motorbike, to share the good news and crawl into back into bed. 

All things considered, I'm still pretty lucky, I've heard horror stories about friends spending two weeks trying to recover from the dysentery fairy, dealing with glucose drips and all sorts of fun things like that, and I was up and feeling just fine a day or so later, happy to be alive and to have heard almost all the dysentery puns my cousin could come up with.  

Dysentery is one of those things that happens because of a lack of clean water and spreading the germs by not washing food or their hands properly, so I've been even more careful than I was before, but sometimes it just happens. 

Now I only have to get malaria, giardia, and typhus to be a four star general and a total pro at Ethiopian diseases!