And then I got sick

Now that I take a step back to look, things had been going pretty well on the work side of things. Days have been incredibly long, but things are moving forward at a nice clip now that our field work has begun. Working closely with Haitian staff is an incredible pleasure. My work here is being led by a team leader who's idea was that 30 Haitian staff would participate in a 2 day capacity building / training workshop on working with communities, on non-judgmental communication and open listening techniques. They then go out and collect the knowledge from communities, rather than having a bunch of Westerners like me carted into a community to try to collect data. It's really an exciting approach to find out what people are thinking about the humanitarian response.

Today we were to travel to Leoganne, the epicenter of the earthquake. I had been there a few weeks ago. It's about 2 hours from PaP and the ride there is not easy. Traffic is horrendous, the vehicle uncomfortable, and the roads are in bad, bad condition. So when I woke up in the middle of the night with what felt like an alien crawling inside of my stomach, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to make it out there today.

Sure enough, I spent the day feeling absolutely rotten. I won't go into the gory details, but suffice to say it was an awful food poisoning experience. I slept almost 90% of the day. And I still feel pretty bad. But before I could barely walk or use my fingers to type (never thought that typing would feel like such exercises!), and now I can at least type a bit.

Furthermore, two other people weren't able to show up out of the 30 because they were too ill, and 7 people had to be taken to the clinic in the middle of the day.

It's been pretty disappointing to have this experience on one of the days I was most looking forward to, but I was smart and didn't try to push myself. There's no way anyway I could have gotten in the car anyway, so not like it was much of a choice. And I am pretty sure that there's no way I could have slept in the hot 'housall' warehouse with no AC and bad bathroom situation.

But tomorrow's a different day and I hope that I'll be fully recovered. It's been a while since I've had an experience like this!