A Brief Entry on Health, With No Theme

Yesterday, instead of going to the Embassy to meet with the relevant secretary, I spent pretty much all day sleeping on the couch in the volunteer lounge, or shitting out my guts in the volunteer lounge bathroom. Whereas in the States, bodily waste is either number 1 or number 2, here in PC/Togo we have 1,2,3, and 4. The first two are the same; 3 is when you don't so much shit as you piss out your ass; 4, which is more common than I care to reflect upon, is when you both shit (either type-2 or type-3) and puke at the same time. Yesterday I held steady at number 3. This was accompanied by extreme abdominal pain, extreme headache, extreme nausea, and general weakness that left me either unable to get up or on the brink of fainting every time I did.

Today, however, I am fine.

In terms of health, I'm probably one of the most resilient volunteers here in Togo. There are other volunteers who rarely get ill, and when they do their illnesses last only for the short term, and require little medication but lots of rest. There are also those who have had no health problems but who then become gravely, frighteningly ill.

I can't really accurately say what the average health/sickness cycle is for most volunteers, because many of the illnesses (amoebas, giardia, other shit living intestinally) last for a long time (often due to lack of treatment due to unwillingness on volunteers' part to go to the med unit) and become part of the daily ignorable routine. I do know, however, that my girlfriend gets 'sick enough' about once every month or so. Not so sick that she has to be rushed down to Lome, but sick enough that she's in pain/on the toilet for more than one day in a row. Not to reveal anything too personal, but she was the first person to define number 4 for us, from experience.

So I consider myself lucky, when it comes to health. The sickest I've ever been was the night of a cluster-mate's going away party. The four of us in the cluster got matching bubus, with are like mumus, and then had ourselves a beer and tchouk crawl. I personally drank 3 liters, 30 centileters of beer, and three calabashes of tchouk (chugged; we were racing against some Togolese dudes at the tchouk stand). Needless to say, the rest of the night was immemorable.

My relatively good health here in Togo, in conjuction with my capable language abilities, often leaves me (usually while sitting at a bar) thinking to myself that, yes, I can handle being overseas. I can survive living in Togo, or another part of Africa, or even a place a little more 'accepting' of my skin color. But right after I have this thought, I realize that I don't want to survive in these countries, I want to go home. This always leaves me feeling slightly guilty.

Guilty because it brings up the questions that I sort of addressed in the last post, about privilege and luxury and all the aspects of zero-sum theory, which, at its most basic, says that one cannot have without depriving another. My good life in the States must is directly correlated to the poor life of someone somewhere else. If I'm totally wrong on my interpretation of zero-sum, I apologize, and would look forward to explanations helping me understand it further.

I try not to let the guilt overtake me. Dave Eggers wrote, in, I believe, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, though it might have been AHWOSG, that being born into privilege (in my case, white middle class in the United States) is so far beyond the choice or guidance of the individual that to feel guilty is useless. What are you going to do, give away everything you have, become poor and suffering on the side of the street? Sure, you could, but being a semi-utilitarian, I think you should never throw away the opportunities you already have. After all, my privilege has brought me to Africa, in an attempt to help an apathetic populace (my remarks are very editorial), which most people would say is a good thing, which deep down I still believe has merit and value, despite the reality that I've seen here face to face.

The other thing that eases my guilt is the simple and plain fact that I love the United States. Geographicall, socially, politically (despite some really frustrating shit), and emotionally. I am not a European, or an Asian, or an African, I am an American. It's weird how I'm just now beginning to get comfortable with that. When I was young (like, 22 and below) I thought so highly of people who spent long stretches of time living overseas. I thought that any capable, intelligent person would not only be able to live in a foreign country, but would choose to do so, and that those who could not, or would not were missing some key element in their lives. I no longer hold the expats in such high regard (though neither do I fault them; to each his own). It's both humbling and comforting to realize how important my life in the States is to me, and that I don't ever want to let it go again.