Growing Pains

In my travels I have learned that I am quite happy and elated to be on my journey.  But after two or three weeks my heart starts to long for familiarity and the routine of home. I yearn for the comfort of my own bed, the smell of my own sheets and simple normality. I was rather surprised to discover this last year when gallivanting around Europe with my family. On the second leg of our trip, just after landing in Italy I remember saying, "I can't believe that we have two more weeks of this trip."

This realization stunned me quite a bit.  I will not deny that I can be quite lazy, who doesn't love an afternoon well spent in front of the television watching a Cary Grant movie marathon on TCM?  Or perhaps Law and Order better suits your fancy.  So you would think that being at leisure, touring and getting cultured would be something that I could never get enough of.  However, I will also acknowledge that I come from a family of workaholics and have banged out many an eighteen hour day. What a strange combination.  Armed with this knowledge I was ready to face the inevitable third week homesickness. 

It is also a well known fact that there a few things worse that being ill when not at home. Having a fever or the rumbly tummies could make even a navy seal want mommy.  Whenever I am ill it is most likely a sinus infection, a personal favorite of my body.  I stock up on tissues, tea and saline nasal spray and I know that I talk to my mother quite regularly from the comfort of my couch.  And every time I hear the ache in her voice to be by my side, to comfort me even though I am an adult of twenty-seven.  And last summer when the mysterious stomachs pains (that I would later discover we're due to a gluten intolerance) returned when I was teaching in Alabama, she threatened to drop everything and fly down to Huntsville to be with me.  It was a very much appreciated but nonetheless very silly idea.  Especially since it was opening week for the resort where she is program director.

"What are you going to do, just look at me be in pain on the floor?"

"Well, " she sighed " it would make me feel better."

To which I replied, "I think there are a lot more people who need you there."

I faired that storm with the help of friends and the lovely community surrounding me down there.  That memory surfaced when I was preparing for India.  I knew I would probably come down with something at some point while here.  The length of my stay was too long for me to be healthy the entire time, the air too polluted.  Not to mention the fact that I had be warned  "everyone gets sick when they're in India".  You don't see that on any billboards.

 

What I was not ready for was perfect storm of awfulness that was about to blacken my horizon.  And like the beach goers of early summer in Maine, I was not necissarily warned by big black slow moving ominous clouds.  This thing swept down from the north quickly and all the warning I had was a sudden swift cool breeze on my back.

At this point let me say that this is about to get graphic. I will not venture into great detail but I would not properly be reporting on my time here if I was not honest about it.  If you are squeamish, easily grossed out or have not reared children stop reading and and we will see each other at the next post.  This is not for the faint of heart.

The second week that I was here two of my roommates came down with  stomached issues.  I was surprised to see that it took them nearly four days to recover and return to work.  I have suffered from indigestion.  I live in NYC where you can the worst possible food for you from all over the globe.  And these eateries are open till the wee hours of the morning making the likelihood that a night of drinking will preceded these bad gastronomical choices inevitable.  Needless to say, I've made food choices I have later regretted.  But getting an illness that knocked you out for a week had been reserved for the respiratory system in most of my experiences, but hey, I'm not one to judge. I had been very lucky not to be ill so far, and I knew it.  Claire had been so kind as to point that out to me.  But after my second week, I felt fatigue and illness creeping my way.

 

The air here is of the worst quality imaginable.  Well, short of people needing to walk around in hazmat suits due an outrageous toxic spill or nuclear blast or something.  Everything is covered in a layer of grime and dirt.  Most streets here are not paved, they are dirt and since it is not the rainy season everything is very dry.  So dust kicks up very easily.  Also, the waste management program here would make even the environmentally challenged American raise an eyebrow.  There are no trash cans here in Kolkata, none.  I can never find one anywhere at the homes or the mother house.  So everyone just throws their trash on the ground.  When getting chai on the street they serve it to you in a little clay cup that transfers the heat rather quickly.  So you stand there burning your fingers and your mouth on this tea that just kinda tastes like clay.  But the good news is that when you finish, you can shatter your cup on the ground and demand another just like Thor.   All day this garbage gathers, and then at some point, some mysterious group of men sweep all of it into the gutter.  After it has been picked through by all of the dogs, cats, goats, cows and buffalo the rest is set on fire.  I guess we can't blame that hole in the ozone layer entirely on 80's hair bands.  This is the air everyone is breathing. Delicious.  I had been handling the air quality fairly well, but it was after several consecutive nights of a group of chain smokers camping out on my door while I attempted sleep that I came down with a sinus infection.

 

I knew I was coming down with something and that I needed sleep. But I had promised Claire that we would go to the leprosy colony together.  There is a group that goes out every other Thursday that leaves earl in the morning but is back by lunch.  That morning I woke up feeling very groggy and it was with great effort that I even made it out of bed.  Had it not been for the seventy rupees that I had paid for the bus to take us there I am fairly certain I would have bailed.  Having prepaid for things that are early in the morning is a great incentive to make sure you actually go.  

The bus ride out was long and crowded, but there was good company and conversation so I didn't mind terribly.  The tour at the center was lovely.  Victims of the disease are able to get full treatment and are even given jobs. They harvest food and care for many animals that are able to use for sale.  They also work making clothing and blankets for all of the other homes.  The blue and white habits that are the uniform for the sisters are made there.  The children of people at the center are cared for and schooled.  People who are far enough along in the stages of the disease that they require prosthetic limbs have them.  They were easily the happiest most convivial  group of indians that I met. It was a wonderful experience.

The return trip was not so wonderful.  I have always had a tendency towards getting motion sick, and this ride proved to be the worst.  My head was pounding from sinus pressure and my stomached was queasy from the ride.  I got off the bus, walked directly home and passed out.  I proceeded to sleep and cough and wheeze and blow my nose for the next three days.  I was so exhausted, I hardly ever got out of bed except to eat maybe one meal a day or to lay in the sunshine.  I plugged in to my audio book and lived in that world while I recovered.  Three days of resting up passed before I felt I was ready to return.  After all it was Hanna's last day and I wanted to send her off.

  

My return was triumphant, many people were asking for me.  I guess even among the volunteers my hair color does not go unnoticed.  Several people I had hardly seen but in passing came up to me, " I was just asking my friend if they had seen 'that girl with the red hair'," they would say or "I am so glad to see you are feeling better."  My friend Anna came bounding forward and hugged me proclaiming, "You're alive!". I was filled with a sense of community and belonging, it was wonderful.  I was even greeted with a smile from Dilip when he saw that I was back.  I was having a great day.  Claire and I had made plans to get masala dosa (a dish popular in the south) for lunch.  We sat in the cafe talking about life, our trips, New York and Hanna leaving.  After lunch, Claire took off to go back to volunteer in the afternoon and I went to rest.  I was not quite feeling back to myself and I was exhausted.

 

The next morning we said good bye Hanna after a lovely breakfast.  Claire and I decided to take the morning off, she wanted to go shopping.

  She turned to me and said, "What do you want to do?"

"Lie down!" I said emphatically. I had a pit in my stomach that I knew had nothing to do with Hanna leaving.

 

I made a bee line back to my room where I tried to get control over my flip flop cramping tummy.  I took a fist full of tums and lay down.  I attempted to sleep through the pain, then Claire insisted that I needed good bacteria in my system.  So she convinced me  went to try some curd.  Now, I like regular yogurt, and I love Greek yogurt but curd is foul.  Greek yogurt is bitter and tangy but it's thick and very creamy. While regular yogurt is thinner and not as creamy it is sweeter.  Curd is thin and bitter, the worst of both worlds.  I put one spoonful in my mouth and looked at Claire horrified.  She smirked then grimaced and suggested that I add more honey.  After an hour I had my fill, a total of two and a half bites.  I could feel the unsavory awfulness churning in my stomach.  I briefly was able to talk to my mom and then I headed back to my room.  It wasn't long before I was completely regretting the curd.  And if I thought it was unpleasant to choke down, it was only worse when coming back up.

 

There are something's that I observed about myself during this.  Normally when ill, I succumb to my pain and become the most pathetic person.  It is not beyond me to camp out sleeping on my bathroom floor in the comfort of my own home or cling to the toilet as my stomach empties itself.  I know I'm not alone.  You wallow in your illness fidgeting not knowing what to do with yourself.  I feel I can safely say, that since the time when I was eleven when we discovered that penicillin causes me to vomit violently, I have never been this sick.  However, I have also never kept myself together as gracefully as I did through this illness.

 

The paragon, where I am staying is completely disgusting.  I don't know that the bathrooms have ever been actually cleaned with cleaning products.  Once a day a man hooks a hose up and just sprays everything down, like people who have vinyl siding on their houses.  That is basically the extent that things get cleaned here, the old rinse-a-roo.  If he can't hit it with the hose from the hall it does not get cleaned.  This actually isn't that bad for the pop-a-squat Indian toilets, but this is not an approach that I recommend for any western style toilet.  Most people opt to "improve their aim" so to speak, in an attempt to avoid using this bathroom.  However, when your system is trying to empty itself as quickly as possible, this is not the time to check how accurate your aim is when vomiting.  I therefore adopted a very specific posture when in the western bathroom to avoid touching anything.  I would stand with my feet hip width apart and slightly turned in, knees bent, with my hands resting on them and  bent over at the waist.  I would stand in this posture, puking my brains out.

 

One afternoon, I was standing there perpetually dwelling in the anticipatory moment before vomiting and praying it would come soon, when an insect with many legs caught my attention crawling up the wall.  I was finally able to kick start my stomach.  After every purging session I would then calmly return to my room, grab my toothbrush and listerine and return back to the sinks to clean my mouth.  Through all of this I had very little privacy, because even though it's not an open bathroom stall, the sound carries quite well through to the person showering next to you, or the rest of the building for that matter.

  

This purification lasted for five days.  I was confined to my room out of fear that if I went out I was going to cough and then do a public one woman reenactment of the bridal shop scene from Bridesmaids.  No thank you.  I had refrained from any more curd.  My diet consisted of water, water with pediatric electrolyte powder (fruit punch flavor!) and orange juice.  Although, I did discover that I prefer the brand "real" of orange juice over tropicana because it tastes better to vomit. These are the things that you talk about with the other people who were also sick.

 

My roommates were wonderful, running out and grabbing juice or toilet paper and laughing at my misery. They understood all too well, they had been there.  After my second day though, I had to say goodbye to Claire.  It was a sad affair, but I'm sure we will see each other again in New York.

During the days, I was so grateful for my iPod.  The first few days I laid there listening to the audiobooks that my brother had given me. As I laid listening to Pirates Latitude a raw ache unrelated to my physical illness sunk into the pit of my stomach.  I had been here for three weeks and it felt interminable.  How on earth was I going to get through the next three months here?  I wanted my mom, or anyone that I knew.  I wanted something familiar, anything familiar. Everything here is strange and smelly.  I wanted to be home where I had people who knew me and could make me laugh.  I was dreaming about my clothes and my plush bed, my perfume and my make up.  I miss smelling good and feeling pretty.  I felt that I was losing myself in this place.  So many of the things that I felt defined me so specifically were slipping away.  I know now I haven led an extremely comfortable life where I have the luxury of complaining about my job where I sing and dance.  How stupid and ungrateful I can be.

 

Then later I remembered the Bugs Bunny cartoons that were on my iPod and the movies.  I was able to plug into the characters that had been so prevalent through my childhood and I thought of my brothers and my Papa.  Why was is necessary to travel to the other side of the world to know that I have the best family? They are not perfect but they are supportive and love me through every cavalier reckless decision I make.

 

Then I watched Hairspray and I proceeded to openly weep in the dark surrounded by my sleeping roommates. But this was not out of homesickness.  I was flooded with all of the love that I felt doing that show.  I can say with the utmost certainty that was one of the best times of my life, just pure unadulterated joy.  And I was lucky enough to not have a romantic fling screw it up. How could I ever be sad again when I had such joy in my life?  Joy that I can still hold on to.  And hadn't I gotten a tattoo to try to preserve that memory?  How was able to get so far away from that and into a place of such unattractive self pity?  I realized as I lay there that these were all valid feelings that I was having, but I was also blowing things out of proportion due to the fact that I was so ill and my brain gets weird when I deprive it of food for a week.  But at the end of it all I realized that what I missed most was being able to freely express myself.  This whole country is so pent up, reserved and deprived and if anyone is going to burst out with any emotion it would be anger.  You are more likely to see a mob with machetes than a flash mob.  You never hear people laughing.  In my life back home I frequently am brought to tears because I am laughing so hard.  There are plenty of people who are friendly.  People smile enough, the sisters are extremely pleasant.  But with them, I feel that because of their life style, they are akin to a Jedi and all their emotions are balanced.  I prefer to have the whole spectrum at my disposal.  And apparently I was attempting to feel all of them at the same time like I was going for some world record.  I guess that the conclusion of this self analysis is that I would rather have to throw myself into the gauntlet of Kolkata every so often to ensure that those moments of pure love and laughing so hard I cry are completely appreciated than lead an emotionally balanced pleasant life.

 

Also, I miss not being the loudest most obnoxious person in the room.  I miss my quippy sardonic gay friends and I miss black people.  I miss singing and dancing and acting like an ass.  I miss my job (not Ellen's or Point Sebago specifically) being an artist.

After four days of eating absolutely nothing and vomiting up absolutely everything Josh popped his head in my room to check on me.  He asked about how I had been feeling and that my mom had sent Kate a message saying she had not heard from me in days.  I filled him in on all the gory details.  His face when I told him I hadn't eaten since Monday was comical.  "It's Friday" he exclaimed! After some consideration and when I told him I still had absolutely no appetite he thought I contracted a parasite and ran out to get me some meds.  I thanked him for getting me some medication and promptly took it when he returned.  I also promptly threw it up after he left.  The next day I was still a complete mess, but after two days of medication I ventured out into the world to see Kate and Josh.  We had lunch that day where I enjoyed a meal of four bites of rice and ketchup. The company was wonderful and the next day we headed to McDonalds where I stuffed my face with four chicken nuggets and eight french fries.  It was familiar and wonderful.  I could have cried and I think I was trying with great effort not to. However, after the ten minute walk back I felt like I needed a twenty minute nap.  But I was getting better.

All in all, I got through it.  No one said that changing your life and working to be a better person was easy work.  I didn't end up back at work until Wednesday.  And while I wouldn't recommend it to anyone as a diet, I also feel lighter.  The first glance at myself in a full length mirror was down right shocking.  I truly feel that the eight days of illness and self reflection that I endured were at the end of it, empowering.  My renewed sense of purpose was nearly overwhelming.  I feel stronger and more capable than I can ever remember.

 

I did the math and I only have about ten weeks left here.  Ten weeks is nothing.