In Which We All Get A Touch Sick

Some weeks are better than others. This last week has not been one of those weeks.

On Saturday, the orphanage hosted a wedding reception for a couple from our church. This involved about 250 or 300 people all coming by for lunch after the ceremony. It was basically an open invite to all the kids, teens, and young adults from our church (maybe the adults had somewhere more important to be) along with the family of the couple. This presented a unique challenge. Namely, it was how to convince people they were going to eat.

Wedding receptions here are notorious for one thing: running out of food. It’s not uncommon to have 200 show up for a wedding and to have food for maybe only 100 of them. What’s worse is when there is a conscious decision by the couple to only buy food for 100 people, knowing people are going to be left out. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as you’ll see) this was not the case and there was more than enough food to go around.

However, this does not mean that the attendees have any piece of mind over the food situation. Telling people that there is enough food to go around usually just makes them suspicious. And when everybody attending the reception is coming from a place where drought, famine, food shortages, and hunger are very real things it is not uncommon for fights to break out over the last plate of food.

Nevertheless, telling everybody there would be enough food to go around did not mean that there was any sort of order or calm in the line to receive food. This is where my job comes in. Most of us here at the orphanage all had some sort of responsibility Saturday: organize parking, make sure there’s enough water for drinking, help out in the kitchen. My responsibility was to to keep people orderly so a riot didn’t break out in the food line. It was a job that turned out to be stressful but thankfully uneventful when all was said and done.

“Well that doesn’t sound so bad,” you say. I would mind you to remember that this was only Saturday, and the weekend was far from over.

On Sunday morning I got up and went about my day getting ready for church. I had not so much as gotten dressed when my stomach started grumbling something fierce. Sparing you from any details, I spent most of the morning in the bathroom with a case of diarrhea. Before continuing, I will apologize for those of you that think this is gross, because it is gross. Still, at the same time I ask you to keep an open mind that here in Mozambique this is something which effects people at least once a month here and it’s a really common part of our life.

And the funny thing is, because it is so common here, it is talked about all the time. When greeting people in America with a simple “How are you”, if the person is sick you might hear, “Eh, I got a case of the sniffles” or, “I’m feeling a little under the weather.” If somebody ever says, “I’ve got a case of diarrhea” you tell them to shut up and keep it to themselves. At the most, they might say they have a stomach ache. Here because it is so common an occurance you can be buying something from a street vendor you don’t even know, ask him how he is, and he’ll tell you if he has diarrhea or not. I’m not even kidding. Folks are not put off by talking about diarrhea.

Here at the orphanage, the first thing that people are supposed to do when they sick is tell somebody else about it. This is so we can keep track of how long somebody has been sick and how they’re progressing. It is also so we all know and can be on guard if it’s a bigger problem. So back to Sunday morning: After a little while I pull myself together and head out of the house to let some folks know that I’m sick with diarrhea. At first, I didn’t find anybody, and thought they all might have left for church already. Then, when I made it around the corner to where the bathrooms are, I discovered them. Everybody in the orphanage had taken a chair and just set themselves down by the bathroom. THE WHOLE ORPHANAGE had come down with a case of the runs!!!

There is really no way to express the scene that I witnessed. I think because people so often get sick with one thing or another there’s a certain amount of “gallows humor” about everything here. As each person would leave the bathroom they would raise a fist and shout “Viva Diarrhea”, which was responded to by the rest of those in line with shouts of “Oye” which is kind of like our version of saying “yee-haw”. Weirdly disturbing? Yes. Funnny? Definitely! When everybody is sitting around in discomfort it’s the little things that will lift your spirits.

As we set about to start the task of figuring out just which meal we all ate gave us diarrhea the answer quickly presented itself. Soon, we started fielding phone calls from the pastors at church asking what happened at the wedding yesterday and why everybody that attended was at home with diarrhea. It doesn’t take Nancy Drew to figure out that something we ate at the reception got EVERYBODY sick. However, there were two kids who didn’t get sick, which made it slightly puzzling. After a little more sleuthing, we figured out the cause of the diarrhea was from some bad beans, as the people who were sick didn’t have any beans.

Now, just because folks were making a joke in light of a bad situation, don’t think that Sunday was all fun and games. It wasn’t. It sucked. And it sucked a lot. Many people, including myself, were feeling better come Sunday night, but still about half of the kids weren’t willing to venture more than a few steps from the bathroom.

Come Monday, much of our gang was feeling better, but still about ten people were suffering from what was being dubbed “The Replay”. By the end of the day Monday those numbers were down quite a bit to only five or so kids, but at this point the diarrhea had morphed into just a general stomach illness.

And then in the middle of the night on Monday/Tuesday I was struck with a case of “The Replay”. But because on day two the diarrhea had morphed into some different, equally unholy form of ailment I spent the whole night vomiting out the entire contents of my stomach . Thankfully, in the big picture there were only about 4 or 5 of us that were still sick at this point so the whole orphange wasn’t joining us. Unthankfully, we were each throwing up stuff we ate so long ago that we don’t even remember eating it.

We’re mostly on the road to recovery, and I’ll keep you posted if this happens to become “The Replay - Part Two : Revenge of the Replay”. But in light of everything that has gone one, I just want to explain why I’m telling you about any of this in the first place. I contemplated not telling any of this but I decide to go ahead and do it for several reasons.

The first reason is that it was a major event here. Most major events get put here for you guys to know how our lives are going, and everybody getting sick for 2-3 days is a pretty major event. Its already being referred to as “marriage of diarrhea”.

A second reason it my continued mission to help you get a grasp for what life is like here in Nampula and the orphanage, and a part of that life is diarrhea. On average, a kid will pick up a minor case every month or so, that’s just the way life is. If infants get diarrhea in the jungle they can die from it. It is unpleasant, but it is not uncommon. And while diarrhea is not contagious, it usually seems to hit at least 5 or 6 kids at a time when it does come.

The third reason I’m letting you know is because I want you know that every single day we really need/appreciate your prayers and support. While God is always good to us here, its only because we’re continually seeking his favor and asking for his help. And as many bad things that could have happened from eating tainted food, that fact that we came away with only diarrhea and upset stomachs is a sign of Gods grace.

So until next time, here’s hoping that that your food is a little bit healthier than ours.