Update: Ready for America

Leading up to our highly anticipated trip to America, we have had an incredibly challenging couple of weeks at site.

We both got amoebic cysts, making us drowsy and occasionally nauseous. On top of this, James has bacterial dysentery two weeks ago and a nasty cold last week that kept in bed with a fever for four days. Also, one of our close friends in village also passed away unexpectedly to some possibly preventable illness (we were not told he was sick until after he died). He was young with a wife and children, and the haste with which he came and went was very unsettling for us. Lastly, since we were planning for Hunger Awareness Week – in which we only spent a dollar per day on food – we finished all of our American food reserves. This meant that even when we got sick and wanted to stop Hunger Awareness Week, we could not, so we ended up doing it anyways. It was rough.

Thankfully, it all ended when a Peace Corps supervisor from Bamako came out to our site for a planned visitation. When she arrived, our bags were packed and the house in order, and we enjoyed vehicle transport from our village for the first time all the way to Bamako where we could enjoy air conditioning, electricity, and take our medications to rid us of the amoebic cysts.

Normally, life in village is not so terrible, but the misfortune of the past few weeks has one perk -  we could not be more excited for our quick vacation home. It’s like when it downpours continuously for the last day of your backpacking trip. Sure, all week you occasionally thought about home, but that last day, you long for dry clothes, a warm bed, and a hot shower and think of nothing else.

Hopefully we will be able to see a lot of our blog readers on this trip. However, we have a very busy schedule as is – Joye is taking the Pharmacy College Admissions Test and is in a wedding – so we do not meet up, please do not be too hard on us. We miss everyone and everything dearly and are thrilled to spend a few weeks taking in who and what we can.

Thanks for keeping tabs on us once again!

-James (& Joye)