There is nothing quite like waking up in a new place, around people you’ve only just met, expecting to start your first day of work, and realizing that your stomach is so cramped up it hurts to be awake, let alone move. It happened to me shortly after I arrived in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, and I survived, but allow me to explain what transpired before I knew that I would be ok.
I drank some water, lied down, and texted Heidi, the Just Apparel project manager that I would be working with. “I’m not feeling so great, I’m just going to lie down a bit longer,” I wrote. I didn’t want to be a chore on my first day. 30 minutes later I threw up the water, and 30 minutes after that I dry heaved because there was nothing left in my stomach to throw up. By that point I had called Heidi, but I still didn’t want to be a pain, and I figured it had to be a virus that would pass.
Sadly, though I suppose this makes for a better story, it did not pass that easily, for the rest of the morning my stomach would not stop hurting and I would periodically throw up/dry heave. At one point Heidi was checking on me and I went into the bathroom to dry heave some more. Heidi made the executive decision that it was time to go to the hospitalito. I was reassured that the Hospitalito was a good place and filled with American volunteers. I thought back to my 19-year-old roommate’s spring break trip to Latin America where she had been asked to administer shots and other drugs for the first time. “Don’t let me have a ‘doctor’ like that,” I thought.
When I got to the hospitalito, they had a lot of difficulty finding my shrunken, dehydrated veins, and may have stuck me a couple times before they could get the IV in, but otherwise I received very good care. It turns out I had giardia, a nasty parasite that was attacking my stomach and intestines. I was sent home with some Flagyll medication, which does wonders to kill the parasites, but tastes terrible. Within a couple days I was out and running again, and I finally Ihad my first day of work.
It’s striking how easy it is for a comparatively wealthy volunteer from the US to contract a parasitic infection, get treatment, and get back to business, while so many children around here have chronic intestinal problems. Giardia is just a part of life for the population of Santiago. Clean water is hard to come by, and it’s certainly not cheap. The sewage system here is rudimentary, and in the outlying areas, latrines are far from universally available. I suppose people’s bodies get used to parasites (any doctors who can confirm that in the comments?), but after what I went through, it’s hard to imagine.
I’ve learned that if you come from the right place you can get sick in a foreign country, around people you barely know, and live to smile about it… though you might want to wait till the stomach cramps go away to laugh - it hurts a lot less.
Katie
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