Traveler's Diarrhea - It's a Thing

Greetings from Africa!

A note from Josh:

Over the past couple of days I have had the wonderful opportunity to experience a 'special' part of African culture; namely, traveler's diarrhea.  I lived between the bathroom and bedroom for two straight days and was put on a total of 6 different medications - most of which stayed down.  Also of note, I was the only one of us who got sick and ironically, the only one who had DUKORAL before coming on this trip...thanks Dr. Colby...  Now I am feeling much better and am ready to go back to work at the hospital.  Tomorrow I will be going on rounds with Dr. Wester while a couple of the other students (Matt and Marshal) will venture out with a medical team to a small town to treat malnourished children and babies.  Also, just a note about email, it is very difficult to check and respond to emails here due to the slow connection so my communications will mostly be via this blog (I appologize to anyone who has sent me lovely emails that I have not seen or responded to yet)

A note from Matt:

A lesson about killer ants:
So in Africa, we were told a day or two after arrival, there are some kinda nasty things.  Some are obvious - like black mambas, green mambas, any colour sort of mamba really.  Don't go swimming with hippos.  Try not to walk through spider webs with large multi-coloured spiders hanging in them.  That sort of thing.  Well, we were also told that if you ever see someone walking through the jungle suddenly start running and stomping their feet, you too should run and stomp your feet because chances are you've stumbled across a colony of killer ants.  There are streams (literally) of them that wind through Africa, guarded rather protectively by soldier ants which line the columns with pincers held wide.  Well.  We found a little tributary of these things during a leisurely saunter through the local Garden of Eden here (beautiful place built for agricultural development purposes).  And I thought it would be fun to make these things mad.  Hehe.  Except not.  So after blowing a whole column all over the place with a great huff and puff, I found one or two of those little soldiers crawling up my shoes.  Mildly curious about how much their bites actually hurt, I didn't do what we had been told to do - that is, run and stomp.  And so very shortly, as if on cue, they chomped.  And THEN I stomped.  Little buggers drew blood through my clothes!!! And they don't let go, either.  You can apparently use them to suture cuts if you are short on supplies . . .  So anyway, if you ever find a column of these things, my advice is let them go about their business.

With love,
Us