Just don’t even bother reading this.

March 7, 2011 at 5:44 pm ("I hear mumbles and grumbles...")

Fair warning, this post is written out of sheer, utter, complete, total, absolute, unmitigated, never-ending boredom. In fact, I suggest that you stop reading right now. Don’t waste the precious minutes of your purpose-oriented, busy life on the pointless verbal ramblings I’m about to unleash on…, well, on no one, because I did tell you to stop reading, didn’t I?

Last week I was the sickest I’ve ever been in Ukraine. Probably the sickest (or is it “most sick”? possibly “sickest” isn’t a word) I can remember on record. On my record, that is. I had been fighting something off for about 2 weeks before the Week of Desolation began. It happened right after our 2 week quarantine ended. There’s no question in my mind at all that being in a building with 600 kids is the reason I started sneezing and blowing my nose regularly. As far as I know, I don’t have any allergies. Except I guess I could say I’m allergic to classrooms of children in winter time. Close proximity has kept me ill for about a month now.

I recovered, or at least returned to a state of functionality, and made the trip to Kiev to get a tuberculosis test. I was pretty sure I would be positive. In the same way I always seem to think things won’t turn out the way I want them to. Like how I was 100% without a question positive that my littlest sister would pop out a boy instead of a girl. I never really told anyone at the time, but until I was able to examine her slimy little body, I was convinced that we were going to have to repaint her pink bedroom and redo all the pink curtains and pink crib bumpers and the frilly pillow decorations.

Also, I thought this because I feel like every other week I hear about some volunteer who tested positive. The Peace Corps, despite our high ideals and willingness to sacrifice life in the States to help others in need, is a lot like high school when it comes to rumors. I know things about people I’ve never met, and probably will never meet.

Anyways, I decided this would be a good time to get some facts straight. I was under the impression that just being on a bus with someone with TB would mean that I’d test positive. I swear someone told me that. Turns out, it’s not that easy.

The PC doctor explained that TB is something of an epidemic in Ukraine. Many people have it, but they don’t know it, because health standards are pretty low and people don’t go to the doctor when they should. He thinks that the vaccination doesn’t do much, because everyone here is vaccinated but the TB rate is still very high. (P.S. We don’t get vaccinated in the States, which is why the doctor was telling me all this, because basically, he didn’t think it would help if we were.)

TB is the kind of illness that comes along with other illnesses, and isn’t too common in really healthy people. To get TB, a healthy, TB negative person would have to have constant, prolonged contact with an unhealthy, TB positive/active person. Eventually, after all that exposure, he or she would probably test positive as well. The TB would stay dormant in the healthy body, and although the person would test positive, there wouldn’t be any other bad stuff going on. The TB would be inactive. But, if this person started doing lots of unhealthy things and the immune system deteriorated, eventually, it could become active. Also, you can’t get TB from an inactive TB-positive person. Only from an active one.

So that took care of my worries. I have prolonged exposure to pretty much no one other than my lonesome self, and then maybe 3 other people regularly. So if I don’t count that multitude of sick children I teach, then I should be ok.

So in Peace Corps Ukraine, there’s usually about 6 or 7 volunteers a year who test positive. In the 20 years the Peace Corps has been in Ukraine, only one person has had active TB, and that person was particularly unlucky enough to have contracted the somethingorother-resistant kind that is common in my oblast (aka state).

I tested negative, by the way.

To get the TB test, you have to have it checked 3 days after they shoot it into you. Rather than spend those days wasting away in Kiev, I took another overnight train out west and went skiing. The Healthy Lifestyles Working Group that I’m in organized a trip, and we had a cabin for 20 in the Carpathian mountains. This was my absolute first time ever skiing, and possibly the only time I’ve done anything fun with snow in Ukraine, so I was nervous and excited. And by the time our 30 minute chair lift to the top of the mountain ended, I was also scared.

We didn’t discover until the last day there that beginner slopes did exist. This meant that I pretty much just went down a step-above-beginner mountain on my first go. It was rough. No one could really seem to figure out what I needed to know. 6 different people telling me 6 different things: “You should pizza slice!” “No, she doesn’t need to pizza slice! No one pizza slices!” “YES! she should pizza slice!” Me: “What do you mean, ‘pizza slice?’”

I ended up kind of figuring out what to do by feel. My friend Katelyn stuck with me the first trip down, and that was pretty exhausting, only because standing back up after a fall is really hard to do when your feet are 20 times their normal size and you’re on the side of a mountain.

I guess it’s a good thing that I had absolutely nothing to compare this mountain to. Everyone was talking about the similarities and differences between the way things worked here and the superior ways of American skiing. I didn’t know any better or worse.

I did find myself feeling very jealous of the little kids zipping around like they owned the place. This is definitely an activity I wish I had tried before I turned 24 and all my friends know how to ski and I can’t. I guess it gets easier with practice. But “they” say that about everything.

The weekend was a lot of fun. I met a bunch of newbie volunteers who live nowhere near me, so I probably will see any given one of them at most 1 or 2 times again. That’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?

I don’t know if it was the killer combination of already being sick, taking 4 overnight trains in 5 days, sleeping on trains with people I don’t know then in a cabin with 19, picking up germs literally from one border of Ukraine to the other, but I got sick. I was pretty miserable by the time we got to Kiev to get our TB tests checked, and dead by the time I got to Donetsk. Really, my brain and body died on Elise’s spare bed. I don’t think I would have made it back to site if she hadn’t of let me die in transit. It was miserable.

When I got to my site, there was more miserable. I don’t think I’ve had a sore throat that bad since I was in 2nd grade and my friend Elizabeth was always passing me strep throat (she had it so often that she had to get her tonsils removed). After about 3 days of the throat, that went away and in rolled the congestion. This was particularly frustrating because I felt like I was simply missing the right medicine. Sudafed is worthless on big time congestion issues, and also, the only Sudafed I have is non-drowsy. The times that I needed/wanted it most was when I wanted to go to sleep. My other option was Benadryl, which I guess would put me to sleep, but it’s for runny noses. My nose is like a faucet when I go outside, but that wasn’t my symptom. I didn’t want to be dried up, I wanted to be cleared.

(IF YOU ARE READING THIS AND THINKING TO YOURSELF, “Jessica, really, I don’t care about the vices and virtues of Sudafed and Benadryl. This is painfully boring to read.” I WOULD LIKE TO REMIND YOU THAT I TOLD YOU THIS WOULD BE POINTLESS, AND I TOLD YOU TO STOP READING A LONG TIME AGO. SO QUIT COMPLAINING. YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.)

One call on the phone to my counterpart and I was ordered to stay home. I didn’t argue, as all life had left my body at that point. It didn’t return till about Thursday, but Natasha still didn’t want me to teach. (I had left her a bunch of stories and articles for our classes, and I think she had the whole week planned, so really, it was also a large part to do with not needing me to plan any lessons. I’m cool with that.)

But I did go into school on Thursday morning to meet with the book company guy. We ordered our text books! The new books are great, and Natasha is very excited. Honestly, I think these books are coming at a perfect time. By the time I leave in November, she’ll have been sharing her classroom with an American for 4 years. Often, when we talk about lessons she looks at me like she’s helpless, like she has no idea what to do, despite her 20 years of experience (imagine how that makes me feel, me with my 1 year of experience), and she even tells me that. That she has no idea what to do. Sometimes I wonder how she going to do this without me. But then, I think, you know what, she just needs a chance to do this on her own. She’s seen enough in 4 years to know that she doesn’t want to teach the way she did before, the static way most teachers still teach here, but she is often overwhelmed by the thought of doing the work and finding the “communicative” materials on her own. But this week, I was gone sick, and she pulled out the stuff I looked up for her, and she took care of the whole week on her own, using videos, short stories, news articles and other materials that are normally only present in her classroom because I find them for her. It made me realize that she really does need a break to teach on her own. She needs to see that she can do all this fun stuff without an American. (I realize I’m coming across a little patronizing, but sometimes I’m amazed at how little confidence Natasha has in her abilities.) The new textbooks, I can tell, have given her a lot of confidence in that respect. To have lesson topics, exercises and texts already compiled is amazing. Such a time saver, and I think that’s just what she’ll need next year when she’s no longer working in a classroom with another teacher.

*I found stick pretzels at my store today. I’m eating them for dinner, right now, as I type. My happiness about this is akin to how I felt when I discovered Oreos had finally made it to my town. Pretzels are something that you usually can only buy in big cities, and I found a bunch of happy packs here. Yay!*

Friday I felt up for teaching, but my only 2 classes were cancelled due to the Women’s Day concert at school. International Women’s Day is March 8, and it’s a pretty big holiday in Ukraine. In fact, I have a 4 day weekend because of it. Friday we had the typical singing and dancing, all done with amazing amounts of sincerity and earnestness. Really, it was funny. But I have lost interest and no longer feel like trying to put the whole scenario into words to for you. I mean, you’re not reading this anyways, right?

What else, what else? O yes, so I started this blog meaning to get into the winter depression I’ve been dealing with pretty much all winter, but I think I’m all typed out. Basically though, I have reached a legitimate stage of hibernation, although instead of feeding off of current body fat, my body makes do with the massive amounts of unhealthy, random and irregular meals that I make myself–like curry rice for breakfast and pancakes at 10 pm. If there was ever even a sliver of love for winter in my body before I came to Ukraine, it has been entirely purged. It no longer exists, and I am positive that it will never return. If ever in my life I am in this situation again, isolated in a tiny town where I can communicate with only 3 people, buying food at the market that is frozen and covered in blankets, suffering through snow that is either never-ending or constantly coming and going causing massive amounts of mud, and aching for legitimate exercise outside of my apartment, I will, well….It will never happen again. I will do everything in my power to never ever live like this again. I do not like it one bit. I don’t like the whiny person I’ve become because of it. Maybe I am just a whiny person at heart, and being here in this situation brings that out of me–my true self. In that case, I would prefer to not know that about myself. I would like to return to comfortable living conditions wherein I can lie to myself and convince myself that I am a strong-willed person who, if faced in dire circumstances, would be cordial and motivated and all those other things that I seem to have entirely lost the ability to fake.

And on that depressing and sarcastic note, I bid you goodnight. You, who are not reading this.