8/10 Out of steam

8/10  Crap.  We’ve only been here two months and we are out of steam.  Neither of us has any energy, K has stabbing pains after every meal, I am done with the main stages of a Nepali cold with just the endless weeks of coughing left, K’s vision occasionally goes black while she’s teaching, and I spent a couple interludes tonight vomiting uncontrollably, first in a squatty potty, and second in a western toilet that is not connected to any inflow pipes and so reeks permanently of the liquid contributions of the various teachers, staff, and higher level students who have been upgraded from the student bathrooms where tiny people stand outside the door, trousers around their ankles, peeing on the floor.

Stale urine is a rather stunningly commonplace odor in our schools.

We haven’t been here that long, not even two months yet, and we feel run over by buses.  The heat is continuous, the bacteria more multitudinous than back home by an astronomical exponent, we are continuously on stage wherever we go, the classes are as demanding as classes of children always are I suspect, with the added bonus that large numbers of the students have no idea what we’re saying, and then there’s the food schedule.

We are expected for morning tea at 6:30, though nothing happens for two more hours, when we eat a massive, substantially spiced breakfast of rice and curry.  Then people don’t eat until 1:00 when they have a small cup of tea and a biscuit, then nothing until 8:30 at night, when they repeat the massive rice & curry meal then go straight to bed.  So basically they eat at 8:30 AM, then PM.  12 hours of nothing in between, and try to sleep with the full belly at night.

I have lost an inch or two off my belly, which didn’t really have that much to spare before, and have burned off all the muscle I incrementally built over the last year.  (And the other peacocks were just in the habit of nodding to me as we passed going to and from the weight rack.  Rats!)

I am whining like never before, I deeply apologize, but you’re reading my whine-diary today.  Let me know if it’s horrible.

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