Staying Home Sick

Monday was pretty rough.

This wasn't my first time not feeling well in Africa, but this is the first time that it didn't go away in half an hour. Part of moving to a new place is that the food and the climate and even the air quality is all different, and sometimes that can make you sick for no reason. This is especially true if you’re moving to a place where you can’t drink the water, and there are always places to get infected by it. Making the transition from bottled water to sachet water also has the potential to make your stomach kind of upset. And then there’s always the heat and the sun. Sunstroke and heat exhaustion are very common among foreigners in Ghana, and on one of the first days when the air conditioner in the classroom was not yet working, the first victim of it in our group was yours truly.

But this time I was actually sick. I kept on top of my fever, terrified that I would be second (that’s right, one of us has already fallen) to get malaria on the trip. But it never went above 103, and ibuprofen did a pretty satisfactory job of keeping it down. I didn't really need to take anything to lower the fever, except that having a fever when it’s 40 degrees out is pretty miserable. The usual hot/cold flashes that come with fever were just multiplied by the heat and the cold water that I had to wash off the sweat. Normally cold showers don’t bother me here, because it’s really hot out all the time, so the cold water feels nice. But the cold flashes were really good at timing themselves for halfway through a bucket shower.

The day seemed to stretch on forever, but I watched Toy Story 3 for the first time, which was fun, and I hung out with my host mother for a while when my fever was down. All in all, it could have been a lot worse. I don’t know if my host mother really understood I was sick at first. Luckily, by the time lunch rolled around, my stomach was settled, because what she served me was not exactly mild. She fried some yams in palm oil. Now, these were not what I think of as yams, like orange sweet potatoes, but were instead these huge tubours about the size of a loaf of bread that taste a lot like regular potatoes. Anyway, she fried those and served them with a kind of salsa of crushed tomatoes, onions, and the hot peppers that go into just about everything here, as well as Kobe fish. Now, Kobe is considered a delicacy in Ghana, and I had never actually tried it before Monday. It’s a fish (that my host sister told me they “make tilapia” out of… which confused me a little) that has been left in the sun to dry, and then allowed to rot a little bit and then salted. It has a very strong flavor, that was actually really good with the tomatoes and onions, but it was definitely not what I would have thought of as “sick” food. But I ate it, and amazingly it didn't upset my stomach at all, so maybe there was method to the madness.

When she made rice balls with groundnut soup for dinner, though, I couldn't finish it. The spicy and oily groundnut soup just did not make my stomach very happy. I think that was when she realized I was actually sick, because a little while after dinner, she called me out of my room to talk to me. “Amma, do you need to go to hospital?” she asked, “You didn’t eat the food!” I found this kind of entertaining. Eating is a very big deal here.

But by the end of the day, I was feeling better, and I was able to go to school on Tuesday, which was good, because it was our last week of class, and I don’t want to miss it. After we go to our host mother’s hometown this weekend, I’m going to be meeting Carmencita (a friend of my dad’s who works for the World Bank here) for Sunday brunch. I’m excited. She definitely said something about sushi, which would be amazing. I’ll let you know how the weekend turns out! As always, I’ll keep you posted.