I'm back!

Sorry to my blog followers (possibly blog follower singular based on my lack of comments) for my unexplained leave of absence. The past few weeks have been a very unpleasant time in my life, one that has taken a huge toll on my body, mind and general trademark positive attitude.

Some background for my story: Ok it’s more just a rant.

Now that I am an expert, when living in a new country there is literally thousands of things that make you think, “There has got to be a better way to do this”. Usually the “better way” you are referring to is simply the way you are use to back home or more commonly referred to as “the correct way” to do something. This can be a dangerous mentality. When something happens that is different than back home and potentially frustrating I try to instead think, “Oh cool, what an interesting cultural experience”. For example when I arrived in my room in Bandung and went to put my fresh pillowcase on my new pillow. I was surprised when as I slid the pillow into one end of the pillowcase it kept on sliding right out the other end. It seems that in Indonesia pillowcases open at both ends. My first reaction was honestly, “what a stupid idea” but that wasn’t enough. I thought about how there are 250 million people in Indonesia and that 250 million of these double ended opening pillowcases exist and that pillows falling out of pillowcases must be a nationwide issue. The whole thing put me in a bad mood.

The point of my story is that when living in another country, you cannot go a minute without encountering something that is different than what you are use to back home. And your attitude towards all of these endless daily situations can literally make or break your experience in the country. So now every morning I wake up, I grab my pillow, I search for my pillowcase on the floor since it has fallen off in the night, and as I am reassembling it I smile and think to myself, “oh cool, what an interesting cultural experience”. And it keeps me happy.

On the evening of July 5^th I took a bus from Jakarta to my new home in Bandung. On the way we stopped at a rest stop for dinner. While all the other teachers were eating at KFC, I persuaded one of the teachers to take me to a different restaurant for more of an Indonesian cuisine, somewhere I could guess what might taste good by pointing at a picture on a menu and hoping for the best. It turned out to be a decision that would change my life (for a couple weeks anyways). In the middle of the night I woke to two troubling surprises, 1) my pillowcase had escaped and 2) my stomach was in incredible pain and I spent the rest of the night with diarrhea and vomiting. I have had food poisoning before, usually lasts about a day and then you get better so I thought I could shake it myself. On the third day I realized I had become very dehydrated when my toes, feet, calves and thighs would cramp up frequently due to the huge electrolyte loss over the past few days. I went to the hospital and was informed I had Ecoli poisoning which is a bacterium that causes diarrhea. What a mean single-celled organism. My hemoglobin levels were way off and I was extremely low on many crucial ions. Long story short I spent the next 48 hours in the hospital taking various antibiotics, a near constant flow of intravenous water and ion solution and slowly losing all my patience and motivation to be in Indonesia. After about 5 days of being sick I had lost over 25 pounds and had not eaten a thing. As much as my body had lost, it was nothing compared to how much of my adventurous spirit had disappeared. I realized I had to get out of the hospital when I asked the nurse when I would be able to go home and the medical prognosis was “when you have less than 2 poopy diarrhea in a day you can go home the next day”.

Nooo way! Despite not quite knowing what that means, and feeling slightly icky for hearing it, i understood enough that if I hadn't eaten in 5 days it was going to be a long time before anything solid was excreted from my body and I was allowed to go home. I was able to text the school and they helped me convince the hospital it was time for me to go home and recover on my own. I spent the next 10 days sleeping about 11 hours a night and napping for several hours through out the day. Simple tasks like eating were exhausting and almost always required a nap immediately after. My stomach felt fine and it was a very painless 10 days but the massive amount of water, food and mass that my body had lost had left me feeling incredibly weak and exhausted at all times. What was worse was that in the back of my mind the thought was looming that if I just stayed sick long enough I might be able to go home forever. And nothing seemed sweeter than the thought of going home. My spirit had been broken.

I knew that my recovery could not start until I found the motivation to want to get better. I forced myself to go to the first day of school just long enough to get introduced to the students at morning assembly and meet my homeroom class for about 30 minutes. The warm welcome from the students and seeing their eagerness to learn, and mostly just laugh, smile and have fun was a thought I could take with me for the next few days until I was strong enough to return to teaching. I was given the whole first week off school to recover. Two of the teachers, one Canadian and one Australian, had started sending me home cooked food every day. My Filipino housemates were more than willing to pick up groceries for me and cook their favourite dishes from home for me. Several of my friends from back home started to depart for their own international adventures (Leah has been in Australia as long as I've been in Indo, Caitlin and Mike arrived in Thailand last week, Sarah and Eric leave for Colombia tomorrow, Katie to Colombia on Thursday and Kim and Jared to China in August – I wish you all the best team!) and since I consider myself a trend setter in the group I had to start setting a better example of being a teacher abroad. And the final piece of motivation came from my first visitor from back home booking their flight for October. How can I find all the cool places to take them if I am too busy being sick right?

With many reminders of why I went on this stupid, crazy international adventure in the first place, and a fresh batch of motivation, I have finally mentally committed to recovering so I can start enjoying every minute of my time in Indonesia. In no time at all I will look back on this past two weeks and laugh and say “Oh cool, what an interesting cultural experience!”. At the very least when I am an old and bitter teacher I will win many a staff room competition for "worst first teaching experience".  

I start my first full day of school tomorrow and promise the blog posts from here on out will be much more positive and enjoyable to read. I can finally join the rest of the people in this photo as a teacher for 2013-14 at Bina Bangsa School, Bandung campus.