Hello Again

All right, I am back. I do apologise for such a long delay between updates, but this has been a hectic month so far. Well, it has been an energy draining month, that would explain it better. It started as soon as the guys got back, getting used to a regular schedule again, instead of my holiday schedule of sleeping until late morning (or early afternoon on occasion). I have to say that to an avowed night owl, eight a.m. seems to be awfully early. I realise that some of you have to be up a some insane hour of the morning (five a.m. is an ugly, ugly time to be awake), but when you don’t go to bed until two or three in the morning, eight is too early.
But I adjusted quickly enough and truth be told it isn’t a problem at all. I don’t mind mornings much, and it’s not like it has been terribly cold, which always makes mornings tougher. But more on that later. The first week was fairly uneventful as the kids all got back into the swing of things, as did the staff. We all shared our vacation stories and had a relatively relaxing week to ease ourselves back into the routine of school. And then the second week hit, and thus the start of all the troubles.
The theory that has been floated is that the students all went back to their ‘home countries’1, such as Mongolia, Turkey, Albania, etc, and when they came back there was a large intermingling of exotic viruses. And then there was a large intermingling of sick people. And then there was very little intermingling of anyone at all. Every day there were more people sick, peaking finally on Thursday (or maybe Wednesday) with about a quarter of the population of the school home sick. Our dorm was particularly hard hit as even our staff was down. We have seven staff members, and five of them were too sick to do anything but lay around and try to recover. I didn’t see one RA for three days except for a couple of times where she forced herself to get up and out of her room. She did not look terribly well, though. Kind of like death warmed over, as the saying goes. I was one of the lucky ones in that I wasn’t deathly ill. I just had a slight headache and a very minor cough. I had most of my energy and was well enough to function. One other RA was feeling much the same as I was, so the two of us largely ran the dorm for a couple of days. One day we had 20 of 41 people in the dorm sick. It was a very unhappy dorm that week.
I managed to fight it off until Friday, but that was the day I crashed. That day we had home basketball games, and when that happens we often have a ‘hot lunch’ at the school. A hot lunch is exactly what it sounds like - a lunch that is hot. Usually they take sandwiches for lunch, but once every couple of weeks we take a lunch and serve them at the school, as a bit of a treat and a break from sandwiches. On home basketball days, the central kitchen, which usually provides us with suppers, provides a lunch instead, and then supper is provided by the concession stands at the game (so a burger or hotdog, or something of that nature) and everyone stays at the school to watch the games. It is a bit of a busy day for the staff, as you can imagine. And that is what I woke up to on Friday.
I was dreading it. I couldn’t sleep on Thursday night because the sickness was finally hitting me. I woke up on Friday just dreading the prospect of having to do all that work at the school for their lunch, and then spend the evening at the school, chaufferring the students back and forth and whatever else had to be done. It made my heart quail. But I got up because I knew that not everyone on our staff would be well enough either. I put in one contact because my other eye felt like it would explode at any second and I didn’t want to touch that side of my face.
I went downstairs and helped clean up breakfast a little bit, and then we started our regular morning meeting. I wasn’t contributing much, just listening to what was being said. Suddenly I realised that everyone had stopped talking, so I started trying to figure out why. It suddenly came to me that my eyes were cold and I pictured what everyone must have been seeing. My eyes were closed, my head was leaning back on the couch, and my mouth, I realised, was open. The reason they were all silent was because they were looking at me sleeping on the couch. So I sat up and opened my eyes and smiled at the laughter this spectacle had caused. And so they sent me back to bed. I slept for a few more hours and felt much better. Saturday was better, and Sunday I felt a little sick near the end (I think I had a slight fever) but I got through to my day off where I rested the entire day. By then the rest of the students and staff were basically better as well.
The next week was spent in recovering energy and getting my equilibrium back. I am calling that sick week a wash, it doesn’t really count. We are back on track now, though, which is a good thing. Hopefully I will be able to keep up with the BLOG a bit better now.

1 I put quotes around ‘home countries’ because, due to the fact that these students are missionaries, the concept of a home country is a fluid thing. Most of them are American, Korean, or Canadian citizens, but none of them live in any of those countries. Some of them have barely even visited their country of citizenship. So when they go ‘home’, it is usually to their parents’ mission field, which in many ways is also not their home country as they are not a member of the culture. It is a difficult concept for them at times.