Excuses, Excuses

Hello dear readers,

It’s time once again to devote my introduction to apologies and excuses for my belated blogging. If electronic diaries could collect dust, this absence would be allergy-provoking (especially in the dusty, open-to-the-air home I currently inhabit). Perhaps you are thinking I went back to Krabi after that last post and disconnected from the world, meditating peacefully on the beach with no time to pursue earthly callings like blog maintenance. Unfortunately, my excuses aren’t that good, and can’t really excuse all this time. Despite that, I’ll air out my excuses anyway, if only because they’ll be effective for catching us up.

First, I’ve been traveling a lot. I’m in Sangkhlaburi for the moment, though just. I’ll be in Mae Sot on Wednesday, finalizing things that I can’t believe already (yet only) began a year ago. I don’t finish my contract until late August, but my supervisor will finish sooner, and this will be our last chance to clear some joint work. I just got back to Sangkhlaburi one week ago, after yet another visa run (this time to Laos) and after joining the dengue fever fanclub, a group with a significant branch here in Sangkhlaburi. Dengue fever is yet another lovely bartering tool local mosquitoes offer in exchange for your blood. Bringing us to excuse number two: I’ve been sick.

Just prior to a planned trip to Cambodia for a new visa, I came down with chills on the minibus to Bangkok. The chills quickly changed to chills plus fever, and I froze-burned my way to Bangkok, where I checked into a hotel and didn’t leave the scalding bathtub for a few hours (the chills in addition to the over-air-conditioned minibus had been miserable). My younger brother, who has been visiting and volunteering here in Thailand, was on his way into Bangkok the next morning. We had a flight scheduled to Phnom Penh, but knowing that dengue was going around in Sangkhlaburi, I figured I’d better get checked out at the hospital before even considering the flight. After a blood test, the dengue was confirmed, as were my falling platelet levels. There is no vaccine nor medicine for dengue (despite current scams in Burma), and there is no quick-fix. The treatment regimen is a lot of rest, a lot of paracetamol to keep the fever down, and waiting it out. As the fever runs its course, the platelet levels in the blood drop considerably, in extreme cases dropping until it causes internal bleeding (dengue hemorrhagic fever). Fortunately (for me, anyway), there are 4 different strains of the fever, and I think I got away with one of the milder ones. That said, it wasn’t exactly a picnic…especially with the total loss of appetite. The next week consisted of the following: constant fever, fatigue, and headache, chronic nausea, a weight loss of 2-3 kilos (at least), 2 forced liters of water a day, near-daily blood tests and doctor consultations, exhausting taxi rides in Bangkok traffic, and a WHOLE lot of laying around and groaning. Thank the dear Lord the hotel had Al-Jazeera English, my favorite news channel. And thank the dear Lord my sweet brother Jonathan was there to help me. He gave up his opportunity to see Angkor Wat to stick around and play nurse, and errand boy, and fellow movie commentator, and general friend. I am hugely grateful, as I think I would have had to stay in the hospital otherwise…a considerably pricier and less comfortable option.

The end of dengue fever is frequently accompanied by the blossoming of a beautiful, blotchy rash (which is actually the hemorrhaging of tiny capillaries near the surface of the skin). I was happy to see it, because by the time it arrived the fever had gone down and mostly fatigue, occasional headaches, and some liver inflammation remained. The rash covered the entirety of my legs and hasn’t completely gone yet. At least I was functional when the rash came around, so after about 8 days together, I said goodbye to Jonathan, who was leaving for Ko Lanta, and said hello to Nezar, who by a stroke of fortunate timing was headed into Bangkok for work that week. I stuck around Bangkok the first part of the week, working remotely, reading up on Thai politics and watching the election lead-up (held on July 3), and regaining my appetite on Bangkok’s bounty; then I took off for a super-short stint in Vientiane as I still needed a new visa. I flew out of Bangkok on a Thursday morning, and flew back in by Friday night, new visa in hand. Vientiane was Vientiane—nearly the same as I’d last seen it in December. It is a pretty sleepy little capital, as I wrote before, so it shouldn’t have been surprising. Yet the déjà vu caught me off guard, and memories seemed to rise off the surfaces of the streets. I don’t personally find it that charming of a city, although it has this lovely park and promenade along the Mekong. It really is a park of the people—appropriate for the “Lao PDR,” I suppose. There were children on bikes everywhere, an open aerobics class being led by an energetic lady, teenagers alternately scowling at each other and flirting with each other, soccer matches in the yet-unfinished dirt sections of the park, and vendors with the usual SE Asia street snacks. It’s refreshingly unassuming, especially after the frenzied pace and fiercely-posh fashion of Bangkok.

I returned to Sangkhlaburi last Monday, and found things not exactly as I’d left them. The current deputy director of my partner office is leaving this month, a plan that’s been in place for years but has only rolled into action within the last two weeks. Malaria season is upon the clinics, and they are facing a shortage of malaria supplies, a huge concern that’s not yet adequately addressed. Staff have been in and out of the field, distributing vitamin A and deworming pills in the target communities, and now mountainous sheaves of paper data forms (including the annual census data) challenge us to enter them all into Excel and analyze them prior to their next reporting period….in, oh, 4 days.  In a more fun twist, I arrived back to find 3 new kittens, itty-bitty with newly-opened eyes. The office cat had been pregnant an implausibly long time, so I was relieved to see them all healthy and with surprisingly normal tails. Pictures once they stop looking like half-drowned rats (they are like human babies, they warm up to cuteness over a few weeks). The unfortunate thing about an office with 6 (!) cats is that the risk of fleas runs extremely high, and concurrently, the risk of painfully itchy flea bites runs high. Yeah, that’s been fun. And after 2 stationary weeks during the rainy season, I returned to a room of mildew, 6 kilos of “clean” clothes had to be carried to the laundry lady because rainy season had made them unbearably stinky. Luckily this problem was tackled yesterday with a lot of soap and fans, and though I’m nursing old flea bites, I don’t think I’ve received any new ones. Since returning, I’ve gotten back into the habit of checking the floors for giant gecko turds, clothes for spiders, and checking the dishes for snails, which like the smooth, lightly wet surfaces. (Even though I thought I’d checked my shoes before putting them on 2 days ago, I soon realized I’d squished a slug into the back of one with my heel…there are no letters in the English language that describe the sounds of disgust I made after that.)

So, overall, life has been a little crazy and a little bit rough lately. Yet if these are the worst excuses and problems I’m facing, I still consider myself pretty darn lucky. Given all the things we need to complete at my partner organization, and all that I need to complete with GHAP, time is going to fly until August. I think I mentioned it in a previous post, but my plan in September is to go to Yangon for the month to volunteer teach a group of TOEFL students. Until then, I’ll definitely try to work in some more time for blogging. I was feeling a bit inspired tonight, so I thought I’d at least get a short post out to you (just so you know I’m alive!). For now, I’ll leave you just a few photos from a BKK-Sangkhlaburi trip I made with Jonathan. He had our Mom’s iPod Touch, with this absorbingly-fun app called Color Splash. I played with it most of the way back, and some of the results are here. I actually had some much better samples, but it seems I didn't get them downloaded and now they're all in Koh Lanta. Oh well, maybe I'll add them next time. Enjoy and hope to catch you up again soon with some more travels!