The U Curve

During our training, the peace corps does a session on your state of mind once you get to your site. It is said that volunteers go through a U curve of some sorts. First you arrive in Ecuador or at your site, and you are in the honeymoon period. Everything is so exciting to you, the food, the culture, learning spanish, getting to know your fellow PCVs, etc. Then reality starts to set in, you start missing your family, friends from back home, miss having all the creature comforts that you had back in the states. It is said that you enter a depressed period. Then with time, you either stay depressed and truly start to dislike this country or you start heading back up the U curve, into the humor/ acceptance stage of your perios of service. Well, apparently, this weekend I went through the whole damn U curve...

So for the first time last weekend, I really got sick. Not the ¨oh, I have diarrhia, i just need to drink some water and I´ll be alright¨, that happens all the time...or atleast to me. Not only did I have diarrhia, but I had these sulfur type burps, which are not fun and they taste absolutely disgusting. I would of thrown up too had I actually been able to eat some food. The reason I got sick...maybe it was playing with animal shit all day trying to get a compost pile going while later cooking that night with meat that was probably better left untouched. This was sunday...monday and tuesday really didn´t feel that great. Everything little thing that bothers you about a place becomes compounded when you are sick. The cold showers, eating plates of white rice after white rice, the bumpy bus rides that take twice as long as they should, that fact that in most houses, I can´t stand up straight because the walls are made for 6ft gringos and that you have lost weight from being sick. All those things, and then you realize ¨why am I here right now...what am I doing here?¨

Yet then you wake up one day (i.e. today) and you feel better. The air smells cleaner, you can actually eat breakfast, the spanish just seems to flow out of you, you don´t have to think about it. You realize that life here doesn´t suck, it would of sucked if I was sick in the states too. And you´re heading back up that U curve...