First Enfermedad

May 7, 2008
Wednesday
8:15 am
Our room in Sayausi

Tuesday last week I came down with my first in-country illness. In all honesty I guess it began in the seven days leading up to Tuesday but it was Tuesday morning that I finally called the Peace Corps nurses. (Spoiler Alert: I’m better and everything is fine now)

As you may or may not know the food in Ecuador is different from what we are used to and as you may also know the most common health problems here are usually gastrointestinal (that is another warning for those of you who may not want to know any more than that).

Our meals here usually consist of rice, plantains, and potatoes. Can anyone identify something missing from this triumvirate that might lead to gastrointestinal problems? That’s right, fiber. Well, I went seven days with something missing from a normal person’s daily routine which then led to pretty bad abdominal cramping if you can imagine. When the cramping turned into vomiting and began interfering with eating, drinking liquids, and sleeping I finally called the nurses. They were wholly unsurprised and instructed me to go to the pharmacy to buy some pastillas (pills) y gotas (drops) to help things along. After hanging up the phone I relayed the instructions to Mike who left to go to the pharmacy. However, seconds after Mike left I think our host family got wind that something was going on and start yelling my name, as they thought it was me who had just left. So, here I am laying in bed in pretty rough shape not wanting to move and all of the sudden I hear my name being yelled into the neighborhood (i.e. cow pasture) at 8:00 in the morning.

“Mari! Marita! Mari! Marita!”
“Estoy aqui!” was my weak and apparently inaudible reply.
“Mari! Marita! Mari! Marita!”

So, I willed myself to get up (without vomiting) and go find them to let them know I was just upstairs. I’m still not really sure why they flipped out at this moment in time. I finally got their attention at which point they told me I looked really sick. I said, “Si, estoy enferma and Miguel se fue a comprar algunas pastillas que las enfemeras me dijeron a tomar.” After seeing their nods of what seemed to be understanding, I went back to bed thinking we were all on the same page.

When Mike returned from the pharmacy (no prescriptions necessary in Ecuador) he told me that our host mom and her niece had told him not to give me the pills until they had prepared an aguita (an homemade tea) from four flowers of one plant, but not the roots, several stems of something else, and so on. Keep in mind they still didn’t know what was wrong with me other than that if I took a pill with just plain water it would do more harm than good. Not doubting their good intentions, Mike still came upstairs and gave me the laxative with plain old bottled water and all was well, or at least I was resting as comfortably as possible….for about five minutes. I guess that’s how long it takes to make an aguita.

So, they came in and gave me this tea (which like everything else at this point made me want to go head first into the nearest toilet) told me to drink it and then left. I immediately pawned the tea off on Mike and told him to drink it. He took a few sips then put it on the cement floor near the bed. It was just about a minute after this that the local nurses (our mom and her niece) came back into the room and asked if I had finished the tea and in the same sentence saw the tea on the floor. The look of utter dismay on their faces is hard to describe. What happened next is not. They parked themselves in the room until they saw me drink the entire cup of tea sip by little sip (and they still haven’t asked what’s wrong with me). So, I drank and returned to writhing in the bed…until the next cup of aquita.

This next part of the story was relayed by Mike as he was downstairs eating lunch during the preparation of the next treatment. Please remember that Mike’s Spanish is really good so the usual language stuff that can create confusion in situations like this is not relevant.

Mike was eating lunch (potatoes, rice, and a campo-chicken soup that was made especially for me) and they were asking him what was wrong with me to which he responded I was having stomach pain and that was why I couldn’t come down to eat lunch. Then they told Mike that what I had was gringo-diarrhea and they knew just what to do. At this point the niece left the kitchen immediately to go to the store to buy oregano for the next aguita and Mike remained in the kitchen stuck in some sort of weird cyclical conversation that went something like this:

“Gringos always get diarrhea, this tea will do the trick.”
“She doesn’t have diarrhea, she has the opposite.”
“Don’t worry this tea will fix the diarrhea, it always works.”
“She doesn’t have diarrhea, she can’t go to the bathroom (defecar) that’s why her
stomach hurts.”
“This tea will fix the diarrhea.”
………

So, now the niece returns from the store with the oregano for the diarrhea that I don’t have and they begin to make the tea while the above conversation continues. Mike is exhausting his bathroom vocabulary while still being polite which I have to imagine is a fine line until finally a friend of the family who had been in the kitchen the whole time spoke up. Now if you knew this woman, and I had met her before, it is amusing that she turns out to be the voice of reason in this situation. She will probably come up again in a later story because she is that much of a character.

“Well, if she doesn’t have diarrhea that tea will make it worse!”
“Exactly” or “Exactamente” in Mike’s best Spanish.

The oregano tea at this point was scraped and a discussion began about what tea would be best. The final decision was chamomile served with a spoonful of olive oil. Everyone, including Mike, thought this at the very least would cause no harm so the niece left again to go gather chamomile from the front lawn, where the cows also happen to graze and do other stuff. So, the preparation begins and I guess everyone was feeling pretty good about everything when there was a collective pause, a gasp, and then…

“But what if she has mal aire (bad air)?!?!”

This was followed by some discussion and finally the decision to go ahead and give me the tea but to also treat me with “the” cologne for mal aire. Keep in mind I have been upstairs kind of sleeping/writhing during this whole episode so when the crowd entered my room with a cup of tea in one hand, a spoon in the other, a bottle of olive oil cradled in the arm with the tea, and someone holding an old Tampico juice bottle filled with black liquid and a weird crust around the lid I was a little taken aback. But all of the sudden I was chugging tea and gulping olive oil as someone rubbed that black stuff all over my head and instructed me to breathe it in three times as deep as I can.

I guess it was all over in less than two minutes and it was supposed to help but I still felt pretty awful. And that yucky feeling was only exacerbated when I tried to go into Cuenca with Mike to mail off our Site Locator Form (it’s some incredibly long form that had to be in the Quito office by Friday) but just about lost “it” on the bus so we had to get off and take a taxi back home at which point the pills kicked in and I found myself glued to the toilet at the moment in our house when the water was shut off. Yup, we had water for the seven cramp filled days before this moment but in this moment and for the rest of the day and the following day not a drop of water found its way into the pipes in our house.

When the evening finally rolled around I was given another round of tea and olive oil (no black liquid treatment) with a piece of cake which actually tasted pretty good. I still didn’t fell great and honestly yesterday (an entire week later) was the first time I actually ate normal amounts of food. But whose to say I still wouldn’t be sick if weren’t for the tea (which I received everyday at every meal for the past week with the spoonful of olive oil) and mal aire cologne, or maybe it’s the fact that we now keep a bag of granola in our room, take the local version of Metamucil everyday, and try to snack on fruits whenever we are pasearing around town. I guess we’ll never know.

Other things happened this past week but those are the highlights, or lowlights. We were introduced to the entire mass on Sunday and had to speak in front of everyone with a microphone. It was probably the largest group I’ve ever had to address and it was in Spanish…still it went well and afterwards we were invited over for breakfast at several houses (the priest told everyone we were nice and that they should invite us over for food).

Hope all is well with eveyone back home and just a friendly piece of advice as we end this blog entry: eat lots of prunes, oats, apples, bran, vegetables, beans and chamomile with olive oil!