Sick...

I had my first run in with the combination of tropical disease and poor sanitation on Monday. I woke up at about 6am with that telltale rumble in the stomach. I attempted to ignore it but that only worked for about 15 minutes before I was rushing to the bathroom. Not good. I will spare you all the details, but now I know why they put the bathroom drain/hole in floor directly in front of the toilet. Convenient. This all went on until about noon in regular hourly cycles. I kept attempting to drink water but every time I drank anything, twice as much came back up soon after. I was getting very thirsty but couldn't keep any amount of liquid down so I was becoming severely dehydrated in only 6 hours. This indonesian bacteria is serious business, I've never been wiped out so quickly. I also may have been running a fever, but it was hard to tell. Around noon the people from the office sent over a couple of grad students (Cici and Gito) to take me to the doctor. We went to the red cross clinic on the way to work. At this point I was dizzy and could barely see or think straight. The doc had pretty good english and determined that I had eaten something I shouldn't have and had bacteria in the digestive system. I think it was either the plate I ate dinner off (it had been washed in tap water) or the fruit drink I drank at lunch that caused the issue. When he heard I was staying for a couple more months, I think he decided to try to give me some immunity to the local pathogens. He prescribed this biotic capsule with another type of (good?) bacteria for the nausea and something else I'd never heard of for the diarrhea instead of antibiotics. I have to keep taking this stuff for days but so far its controlling the situation. I spent the rest of the day sleeping and dealing with the soreness/headache that accompanied. However, my room conditions deteriorated in the afternoon. The power went out around 1pm and along with it the running water. My room quickly turned into an oven which impeded my ability to hydrate. Turns out its really hard to hydrate at 95 degrees and humid. No electricity means no fans, no light, no cold shower and no flush toilet. A miserable afternoon drinking this stuff called "bokari sweat" from Japan. mmmmm.... Fortunately, I was finished with the throne for the day, but things could have been a lot worse. I seem to have electricity about 80% of the time, but I'd say I only have running water beyond a slight trickle about 25% of the time. Usually its just a really slow trickle which allows for about 1 toilet flush per 2 hours and no other washing unless I fill a bucket. After sleeping all day I was able to sleep 12 hours through the night. Today I am feeling better but there is still no running water so I'm not going to work until that shows up.

Oh yea, and one more thing. The bathroom light. For the first 4 days I was here this thing would not turn off under any circumstances and its too high up for me to reach and remove it. Therefore most of the time this light is attracting bugs and shining in my eyes while I try to sleep. As my room is open to the outside, bug attraction is no trivial matter. However, after the big electricity outage, the bathroom light just never came back on. Brilliant! Unfortunately, it flickered back to life this afternoon. Indonesia.