02 July, 2007

Malaria Shamaria!

Emmett, can I use your shower? And by "shower", I mean a bucketful of malaria water."
- Kevin, one of the new volunteers

Things have pretty much returned to normal. My malaria case, Tun, is up and about and running around like nothing ever happened and doesn't seem to be relapsing or showing any signs whatsoever that less then a week ago he was suffering from a possibly fatal disease. The other three Laktai boys (Aung, Lu, and On) are being closely watched since the four of them celebrated their brotherhood by giving each other tatoos with the same machine-- Tun going first, before he got malaria. So far, so good.

I have decided not to go on antimalarials. Sarah found a really great drug which wasn't hell on your liver and kicks in in two days. The drug is one of the few that is good for the strains of Malaria found in this area, but ironically it can't be bought here. I would ask for someone to send it but with the way that the mail goes here it will be the cold season by the time it shows up. I am still waiting for a chemistry textbook that I ordered six weeks ago. I have had about as much luck with the mail in my travels as Hilter had in Russia.

I did have my first major motorcycle accident and walked away rather miraculously with nothing more then a briused knee. I'm sort of glad that I got this out of the way as it was an inevitiable event. I was heading through an intersecion that had neither stop light nor heavy traffic when a car came out of the mysterous nowhere. I jammed on my brakes but forgot that I was supposed to use the footbreak. Years of riding bycycles and mopeds had trained by reflects badly for a motorcycle. The bike didn't stop and I was faced with the choice of trying to swerve around the car or taking my chances with the curb. I picked the curb. Fortunatly, when I flew off my bike I fell into a think bunch of Thai soft jungle bushes. God did punish me by giving them thorns. I couldn't believe that the bike was okay, with the exception of a broken fuel gauge and a flat tire. Check that one off the list.

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