I spent the weekend in the sick ward in Cotonou. It’s an interesting story.
Last week I wasn’t feeling well, so I did a MIF kit and sent it to the med lab in Cotonou. (If you don’t know what that is, you don’t want to.) On Thursday I was feeling worse and my temperature was high, so I called the doctor. She said they’d process the MIF kit first thing in the morning.
The next morning I’m teaching a class and our coordinator runs in and tells me that I have to go to Cotonou right away. I ask if I can finish the class and he just takes me outside and puts me in a Peace Corps SUV and we speed off, running red lights and everything, to Cotonou. In the rain. While I’m frantically wondering what the hell the doctors found in that MIF kit.
Nothing, it turns out. When I got to Cotonou they took blood and stool samples but couldn’t identify what I had. The doctor put me on a very powerful antibiotic so that whatever it was, it would die. That worked. I’m back in Porto-Novo and feeling better now. In the end, the doctors figured out that it was E.coli.
The illness was miserable, but a weekend at the PC headquarters felt like a stay at a four-star hotel. I had a bed with a decent mattress and sheets. (I normally sleep on a straw mat.) The building is air conditioned and free of mosquitoes. Taking a shower meant that there was hot water falling on my head. The electricity was on all the time. It was crazy.
I think everyone’s getting tired of training. People who join the Peace Corps tend to have independent personalities, which doesn’t mix well with two months of having six days a week strictly scheduled and living with a host family. Porto-Novo doesn’t help: it’s noisy, hectic, and polluted — what it lacks in industrial pollution it makes up for with smoke from burning trash piles. Only a few more weeks … and I can move to a tranquil village where I have my own house and where a rooster is the loudest thing you hear.
