Well it wasn’t before long that I was in the infirmary, laying on a bed of Guatemalan textiles, crying.

I had my first in-country cry, and that was about Nana.

This was my first in-country-WTF-cry*. My stomach had un globo in it and it simply sat and caused me pain. Not normal gas discomfort, like, “Hey Nati (my Host Mom calls me Nati) there’s a party going on in your gastrointestinal track. Sincerely, Your Future”  I sat and sneezed every 15 minutes and got a fever.

During which we are receiving a three hour presentation on proper food preparation and water sanitation once we are in in our sites (aka out in the bush).

Foods we should sanitize, how to sanitize them, the cornucopia of things that could have touched these foods before we received them, and additional methods of preparation. Suddenly I was imagining myself in Whosville, Guatemala, in front of la pila (sink for dishes/laundry/everything), preparing carrots by peeling and boiling them in order to be sanitary. And water: if I can’t strike up a deal with a local grocery (if I am close to one) to deliver Agua Pura to my site, I will be boiling water and then sealing it in a water tight container, using iodine pills as needed (as this is not recommended for a regular method) and/or bleaching the water. I don’t know about you but, even though I guess bleach/chlorine is used in all water sanitation, it sounds bad. I hate bleach. I avoid bleach. Now I’m bout to be drinkin’ it?

I trust the medical providers, they know what they are talking about. Washington requires that they inundate us with these details (get it).

But I was getting inundated with all sorts of messages from my belly. “Hey Nati, quieres comer nada por siempre y convertirse a un plátano?” Bleach, blugh, bleach, blugh.

So, I went to the clinic to get a rabies vaccine (Tuesdays are vaccine days during training- yippee) and I told Monica the assistant that I needed to lay down.. I’d already had a stress cry in the corner of the courtyard because I felt poopsy.

Dr. Cool-Guy (it’s bad that I can’t remember his name but I’m excellent with faces), he told Monica to send me to lay down and take my temperature. Sure enough, I had a fever. I didn’t really sleep la nocha pasado so I laid under the blanket, cried into 7 tissues, made a pile of tissues, and fell asleep under the blue thermal blanket. 1.5 hours later, Dr. Cool-Guy woke me up and said if I missed the security session, I would have to do it again later. I rallied and went back into the classroom. We talked about how to defuse a situation and stay safe. Also not a lecture I cared to here since my own body was not being nice to me to begin with.

I think it was the atol- it’s simply a blended soup of black beans. I like the way it tasted but an entire soup of black bean watery puree? Isn’t that some kind of crime? Atol can be made with several ingredients, hot or cord, this was a warm black bean one accompanied by small, cute quesadillas con jamón y queso.

So I got home from the office with everyone else in the microbus and cocooned under my mosquitero at 8:00pm. I think I fell asleep around 10. It was still hard to get up today.

Even though I don’t really know the other PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees), they all asked me how I was feeling after I returned from the fever den. I felt very cared for, looked after. It felt like being comforted by people you don’t know but you’ve had recurring dreams about, perhaps. They seem distantly familiar but you don’t truly know them.

Either way, they got to see me at my beaniest, so that’s a start in inviting them into my reality and me in theirs. Watch out PCVs, here she comes!

At dinner, I sat and listened to my host brother (Francisco) regale me with the details of his job managing a call center in the city (that’s what people call the capital- La Cuidad.) It was like listening to a movie that’s in fast-forward. The Spanish is so fast and my mind is so slow. I’m trying to sift out the words I recognize, the words I can guess on and the words I just don’t know, and then all the other words that my mind didn’t have time to sort. Until I catch up in pace, it is going to be like a very drunk person watching a cup fall from a table. I can react but it’s very delayed and there are details I am just going to miss.

*A WTF cry is when your brain throws everything at your eyeballs because you’re already crying so why not send it all down the river? I cried because I couldn’t get on the wi-fi to call Gretchen, I cried from not sleeping the night before, I cried because learning a new language is hard, I cried because two years?, I cried because there is no place like Alaska, I cried because the other PCTs are at very rural sites reenforcing the likelihood that I will live in a rural site and I don’t have a sleeping bag because I didn’t want to pack one, and I cried because I really want to be married someday except marriage is hard and how could I date anyone in Guatemala? And what if I don’t meet the person of my dreams ever? What if my dreams, like some yankee candle scents, aren’t nearly as wonderful as you thought when you saw them? And what if I don’t have any money to travel after this shindig ends and all of the other volunteers run off to Belize waving their Peace Corps t-shirts over their heads?

WTF cries are not helpful for cultivating gratitude. Or perhaps, they are perfect for cultivating gratitude because they provide you the space to think all of the horrible, dumb, irrelevant, irrational, possible, scary, potentials that hang around like mental stalagmites that need to be flushed. Once you flush them, your life doesn’t seem so bad; your worst nightmares seem further from the realm of possibility, and your fever goes away. Your host mom hugs you and you take a shower and go to sleep and start over again the next day.

Poco a poco.