Slow afternoon turns into a henna tat

Yesterday afternoon was pretty calm behind the bar. A girl came in who travels around doing Henna tattoos at music festivals during the summers and then comes to Guatemala in the off season to do business here. As a sort of advertisement, and since it was slow, she offered to give Monyca and me free tattoos (Monyca was the assistant manager on duty). I didn't really have anything specific in mind that I wanted, but my friend Mike immediately put in with his hybrid English-Irish accent (he grew up in both countries):

"Get like an octopus or something, you know, just for fun!"

So it was settled, and an octopus went on my arm. Pretty neat.

Here are the Before/After - one perhaps an hour after she had put on the paste, and then one from today.

That time the hospital was wrong

I started feeling pretty under-the-weather again yesterday after not eating much all week due to nausea and then my IV stay at the hospital. By the middle of the day I knew they had probably misdiagnosed me, and that I likely had a parasite since the antibiotics weren't working and I felt exactly like I had hours before I got violently ill the first couple times. Lucky for me, it was the middle of the day, and I was able to get in contact with the doctor at the local clinic after-hours.

After describing a few telltale symptoms I won't name, the doctor immediately told me over the phone that I had the protozoan parasite giardia. He said I'd have to come by the clinic at 9am when it opened the following morning (today) to get the drug that would kill it, and that I should only drink clear liquids until then to avoid increasing my nausea. I settled in for another long night of feeling weak and uncomfortable, though I'd learned how to manage the symptoms a little better through my experiences earlier in the week.

Around 10pm I stumbled down to the bar for the first time since the early afternoon to get a soda water. As it turned out, one of the managers had had the same parasite months ago, and still had four tablets of the medication left. Someone went to get it for me, and ten minutes later I had the required initial 2-gram dose of medication to kill most of the parasite. I almost immediately was able to sit up straighter and feel more comfortable, with high hopes of being able to fall asleep after all.

This morning I went up to the clinic and met with the doctor to review the other details, and he ended up prescribing more of the same medication to keep taking every 12 hours for several days to ensure that the organism was killed off, since I had a pretty bad case of it.

Still unclear where I picked it up, though it could have come from anywhere. It's not for lack of trying, but there is definitely a lower level of hygiene here than at home.

Apparently the doctor also deduced that I am sensitive to cyanotoxin, which occurs in the lake and cannot be filtered out. So for the rest of my time here, I am to avoid the triple-filtered water that we have, as well as the ice cubes, etc., and only drink bottled water.

Fortunately I am pretty confident I was correctly diagnosed this time, and am on the road to recovery. I can tell it hasn't been killed off completely yet, but that's why I was prescribed the extended course.

Hopefully I'll return to normal health and appetite soon, and can focus on my next move after I leave here in January.

That time I took a boat to the hospital...

Last week I signed up to get my open water SCUBA certification with Oli, our friendly dive master. We are home to the only dive school on the lake, backed by the globally respected PADI credentials, and it happens to be the first or second-cheapest place in the world to get certified ($240), so I figured it would be really fun to do it here. Oli gave me the book and I began studying excitedly.

Sunday night rolled around, and it was time to go over the equipment hands-on. Our first three dives would be in the morning, so the three students needed to get familiar with the equipment ahead of time. Setting up the gear only got me more excited to get in the water the next day and take my first few breaths underwater.

But all day, my stomach had been feeling a little weird. No problems, but just...off. I ate a full dinner (Sundays are pizza nights) and stayed up a bit, but decided to go to bed early to get rest for early SCUBA in the morning. It wasn't meant to be though, and I was up all night in the bathroom getting increasingly more sickly and dehydrated by the hour, and then the minute. It was reminiscent of a few years back, when I spent a similar night in my college dorm bathroom and eventually felt so weak and dehydrated that I woke my roommate to look after me in case I lost consciousness.

Around 6am, I was again at that point, so I woke Julia - a med student and friend who has been staying at the Iguana longer than I have. She had some water and helped me get to a place where I at least wasn't getting sick any more. Finally, I was able to get some rest while she went up to the clinic that she works at. I was brought soda and tea to replenish my electrolytes, and by the time I got out of bed the clinic was closing. Most people figured it was a 24-hour stomach bug that they'd seen in the past. It was true, I had stopped getting sick - but I definitely wasn't feeling better yet. I had a few bites of toast, fed the cat that I look after, and drank a bit more. 

Not too long after, I was getting nauseous and sick all over again. This time was much worse, because I was already dehydrated, but at least it was during the day, and this time I had many more people looking after me, including an Australian nurse who had a small pharmacy of anti-nausea and other helpful drugs with her. I was able to keep them down for almost 15 minutes, but not long enough for them to have the desirable effect so that they could start rehydrating me and giving me other helpful drugs. At that point, it was either Keep trying to do the antinausea and hope that we could get it under control, or Go to a hospital. I elected hospital, once again mirroring my experience from college in which I ended up at the ER with an IV stuck in my arm. That sounded like it would be helpful at this point.

So they hired a private boat for me, which cost me about 400 quetzales (about $50), which I figured was worth it. Monyca, a friend and fellow volunteer, accompanied me to the hospital. It was about a 25 minute boat ride across the lake to Santiago, between the volcanoes in the pictures that I've shared. From there, we took a tuk tuk....think of a taxi that is made from a motor scooter with a small cab built around it. At the hospital, Monyca helped me explain what was wrong and they got an IV in me and some antinausea medication, then potassium and other helpful nutrients until I was feeling much better. It was up to me whether I wanted to go home and come back the next day for tests, or just stay overnight. I decided to stay overnight with the IV and medical assistance close-at-hand, so they put me in a room and kept me on IV all night. They took samples in the morning to determine what the issue was, and then prescribed some antibiotics and released me in the afternoon. Monyca came back to pick me up and help me pay for it with money that the Iguana lent me. All in all, with the overnight, the antibiotics, and the private boat to-and-from the hospital, it cost me about $200. Not too bad. And I'm feeling a lot better now, though I hadn't eaten for almost 2 days.

Others volunteered to cover my shift tonight and for the next day or two, so I'll be taking it easy and making sure I'm back to health.

We're still not sure where I got the infection...everyone eats and drinks the same things here, so that is an unlikely source. In any case, I'm not the first person around to get this sickness, and the med students deal with situations like this all the time - so I wasn't overly worried, even if I was incredibly uncomfortable. It may not have been necessary to go to the hospital, but it was best not to find out.

Anyway, that wraps up my story of how I took a boat and a tuk tuk to the hospital. I'm okay!

The first adventure of "By the laws of YOLO!"

On our first Saturday night, fellow Boston-area-native Jeff met a beautiful girl named Olivia who was based out of Antigua. After a night of partying and dancing, she asked him to come to a party in Antigua the following Monday on his day off, about a 2.5 hour trip from the hostel. Jeff obliged, "By the laws of YOLO...!" (You Only Live Once, for those who don´t know).

And so it was set. The following Monday, Jeff set out for Antigua, planning to return the following day in time to work his shift, 6pm-close.

Tuesday morning came and went, and before I knew it, 5:30 had come around - my afternoon shift was almost finished. No sign of Jeff. Ten more minutes pass, and I'm occupied helping guests.

Suddenly, Jeff appears wildly at my flank, pushes behind the bar, grabs a 10Q bill out of the till, turns and runs back out again, shouting "I'll pay that back in ONE MINUTE."

A few minutes later, Jeff returns, a bit out of breath, and clearly bursting at the seams with a story. Elaine and I settled in as he began to explain. Here's how it went down:

Monday morning, Jeff set out with 250 quetzales in his pocket, or a little over $30. He took a lanza to Panajachel, and then decided to take a shuttle to Antigua rather than the cheaper, colorful, somewhat dodgy chicken buses that are famous in Guatemala. This decision immediately shaved 100Q off of Jeff's in-pocket budget.

Two and a half hours later, Jeff arrived in Antigua, and set out to find the party. Roughly an hour and a half later, he tells, he found the building and met up with Olivia and the others who had come and stayed at the Iguana. Normal pregaming ensues, and Jeff is able to drink his share without paying for drinks at a bar. The party then moves to a venue of some sort, where to his misfortune Olivia ends up with some other guy, and he ends up with her friend. But through it he is able to be somewhat conservative in his spending, and comes out of it with about 60Q left for his return trip in the morning. 60Q - not enough for a shuttle, but enough for the right chicken bus.

Jeff takes to the streets, shaking off his weird night, already a decent story under his belt. At this point he finds and boards a chicken bus toward Santa Cruz and San Pablo. Half an hour from Xela (SHAY-la), Jeff determines that he is Not on the right chicken bus. At this point he figures out that Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz La Laguna are Not the same thing. Cool.

Jeff is down to 13Q at this point. He arrives in Xela, and begins running around with growing urgency in search of someone who speaks English. He finally finds someone, and they help him broker a deal with another Chicken Bus driver, saying that he'll pay 13Q today, and then come back tomorrow to pay the rest. In the end, the driver shrugs and agrees to it. Hope is rekindled for Jeff.

An hour of a bumpy ride later, there is a blaring horn followed by a sickening crash. Yes. The Chicken Bus had crashed head-on into a passenger vehicle...or rather, the passenger vehicle had crossed lanes and crashed in the Chicken Bus. Luckily, Jeff was okay except for a bruised shoulder, though I'm afraid it did not look good for the driver of the passenger vehicle.

Jeff now has no phone, no money, and no number to call even if he can borrow a phone. We applauded him on his planning of this part. But back to the story.

Jeff is left standing on the side of the road wondering what to do, when another car pulls up and rolls down the window and asks him if he's thirsty. A moment of Really?, followed by "...yeSS!" Then he gets to talking with the couple, gets a picture with them, and they offer to drive him to Panajachel. Jackpot.

The rest of the trip is easy, almost. All that´s left is the ride to Pana, and then boarding a public boat with no money in his pocket (the cost of which is 10Q). And you can put the rest of the story together on your own.

And thus ends the first tale of the "By the laws of YOLO!" saga.

The "Where" of the beginning

First post, 3 weeks in. There's some catching up to do. I'm gonna go ahead and start with the "Where?" for the first post.

Guatemala is quite a country. Living here at the Iguana Perdida on Lake Atitlán, it's pretty difficult to relate to the warnings regarding the country that appear on the U.S. State Department webpage, which almost discouraged me from coming just a few weeks ago. The locals do speak of violence in certain regions of the country, but here on the lake there is a rhythm of tranquility that seems to impose an irresistible peace on those around it. You can practically watch this happening in newcomers to the hostel - it happens with comedic regularity.  They show up, stressed from travel to check in for a night or two, drop their bags in their rooms, and come down to sit and look out at the lake for a while. Within 20 minutes, they have taken in the Lake, discussed amongst themselves, and decided with cathartic sureness that they should come up to the bar and see about extending their stay by a few nights, sometimes longer. When they find out it's possible, something that looks a lot like relief registers on their faces. Happens all the time. Maybe the Lake can take all the credit, but I think there is something about the Iguana itself that completes the haven and invites people to forget their complicated itineraries and just relax for a few days. So it's in the context of this atmosphere that I have been living, working, and making friends.

The hostel itself is just recently a waterfront property on the Lake, since the water level has been rising so quickly in the past few years. Apparently, this is typical - historically, the level of the lake has varied by more than 35 meters. By one local's measurements (Jeanne), it has risen by about a meter in the last 2 years. In any case, the hostel is safe for the immediate future, and the narrow street that once ran in front of it is now replaced by docks and boats. 

Most of my volunteering is done behind the bar in the restaurant area, which boasts a pretty spectacular view. Three majestic volcanoes rise opposite the hostel/hotel, and their tops are almost perpetually disappearing into perfect little ring clouds that are actually "fuego," or smoke from the volcanoes. At night, there are incredible lightning storms over the volcanoes that have not been accompanied by rain or thunder once in my 3 weeks here. I'm not sure why this happens, but it's pretty amazing to sit and watch.

Other than that, my exploring has been contained to the hilly/mountainous paths and towns ringing the lake, including (so far) Panajachel, Paxanax (x's are pronounced sh), Santa Cruz La Laguna (where the Iguana Perdida is), Jaibalito, Tsununá, and San Marcos.

I know the stories are what people really want to hear, but I'm hoping that this first post will give some context to the stories that I'll be typing up and sharing soon.

Thanks for reading!

-Jeremy