malaria fun!

Well, I apparently have malaria. Humph. Lucky for me I seem to have either an extremely mild strain of it, or the anti-malarials that I was taking are helping to keep the full effects of it at bay. In fact, I would say that it is only by complete accident that I even found out that I have it. Vikas phoned on Sunday night to find out if we were interested in seeing a movie, but I told him that I was feeling a little under the weather, and that I had a bit of a fever, so I was going to pass. Vikas phoned Dr. Jai, they ayruvedic doctor here, and he insisted that I have a malaria test the next day, even though I felt quite a bit better. So go figure, I tested positive for vivax malaria, one of the less dangerous strains! Anyway, I’ve been feeling shitty on and off since Sunday, although not in any extreme way. From what I have heard from everyone else who has had malaria, you feel absolutely terrible, like you are dying, when you are sick with it, so I can’t help but wonder why I don’t feel too bad. Anyway, I phoned Dan last night, and apparently he is feeling far worse than I am with some sort of flu-y cold. Poor thing!

The past week has mostly consisted of eating giant meals at people’s homes and Indian Coffee house, which we are completely addicted to. Last Wednesday we went to Sareeta’s house for her fifteenth birthday party. It was very sweet, a lot of the neighbourhood boys were there dancing up a storm. It was pretty funny to watch these little guys do these totally over-sexualized dances, pelvic-thrusting dances with the utmost of sincerity. Thursday night we ended up going to Indian Coffee House for dinner yet again, so that was slightly less eventful. Friday, however, Rashida Bee, who runs Chingari Trust invited us over to her house for a belated Eid dinner. We ended up talking business a bit as well, which was just fine, since I have been eager to do some more work for them for a while. It turns out that they already have fourteen interviews with gas and water affected people translated into English, and they are really eager to get them up on the website. My idea is to read through the interviews and try to find some of the families that wouldn’t mind me taking their photos to put up on the website. I could also, with Prabjit, do some more interviews with other families if we have enough time and there is a need for it.

Rashida Bee’s family are extremely sweet. She lives with her husband, her brother-in-law and his seven children. Her four sisters all live in the neighbourhood though, and they all came over to join in the fun. When dinner was over, everyone just hung out in the living room together, laughing and talking. One of the brother’s seven kids was this extremely sweet, absolutely adorable little boy who had been born with some sort of problem with his feet as a result of the water contamination. His feet have grown so that they are curved, almost completely underneath his body, and his legs are just skin and bone, with no muscle. He can’t talk at all, but he seems to understand a lot of what is going on around him, and makes gestures and little cries to communicate. The best part of the night, though, was when he came into the room, the first thing he did was to crawl over to me, climb into my lap and give me a bone-crushing hug. I’m not sure exactly why, but he seemed to take a shine to me, and spent a good hour alternately hugging me, and showing me some of the simple things that he had learned how to do – like making a ball out of a scrap of paper. Anyway, I left feeling very good about life in general, and even more so about the project that I want to do for Chingari Trust. I find Rashida Bee a very inspiring person, as she always speaks about the importance of women in struggles for justice on a global level. She told us (through Prabjit’s translation) that she has been all over the world, Africa, Europe, Asia, America, and she sees that women are held down in different ways in all of these places. I think that it is absolutely incredible that a woman with barely any education and so few resources has done so much with herself, and becomes such a spokesperson on an international scale.

In terms of work, I also spoke to Sathyu about my project ideas for the Health Workers on Saturday, and he was enthusiastic about all of them. The Health Workers wanted to tools to show women in the bastees how to check for signs of cervical cancer using acetic acid, how to do BSE, ad to explain the different causes, symptoms and cures for abnormal vaginal discharge. Essentially what I had though was to make a model of a woman from the waist down out of paper mache, and with a piece of rubber in the crotch to simulate a vagina. Then, I would also build a cervix out of paper mache so that the women could practice using a speculum to open up the vagina, and looking at the cervix. The second idea was essentially to make a female torso and arms, with a space left for a breast made out of two balloons – one inside the other. The inner balloon would have sand in it, and the outer one water, which I think would somewhat accurately simulate the feeling of a breast. That way the Health Workers can show the women how to do BSE, and get them to practice. The third thing is the discharge, the idea for which I just got out of a book called Helping Health Workers Learn. Basically, I’m going to make a few puzzles with each of the different types of vaginal discharge, the symptoms and some easy cures. Each puzzle will be of a different cause of abnormal discharge, so that way the women will figure out which types of discharge require which treatment! So fun…

In other news, we have been invited to our first wedding on Saturday AND Sunday evenings! The rickshaw drivers who always stand at the edge of Qazi camp invited us to their younger brother’s wedding, which should be fun. I have been waiting for an excuse like this to buy myself a really fancy sari, so I am tickled that this gives me the excuse. I’ve already looked at a bunch of stores in both Chowk market and this other market that Mausam took us to on Monday afternoon. I haven’t found anything that I absolutely love yet, but I am going to go to New Market and look in the expensive store operated by the Madhya Pradesh government to see what they have. The other times I have been in there I have noticed some absolutely gorgeous saris in styles that I haven’t seen in the Chowk or other markets. So wish me luck, those of you have been shopping with me know that I can take about a millennium deciding on what I want, and I’ll refuse to buy anything that I’m not sure about☺

I don’t have too much else to report right now. It’s only six weeks until my mom and dad arrive! Yay! I’m really looking forward to seeing them and getting to do some traveling with them… and then after that its only another few weeks until Andrea gets here!! Woo hoo!