Cholera

So apparently Cholera is still a thing.  Guess naivety got the best of me as I always thought it was just something your wife could contract if it was 1840 and you were steering a wagon across the Oregon Trail; an antiquated disease that went the way of disco, cassette tapes and America Online. I thought it was a thing of the past.  I was wrong.  Apparently, I was very wrong.

We got an e-mail yesterday from one of our Doctors (Side Note: Peace Corps provides pretty impressive health care for its volunteers.  Even though this country has something like one Doctor for every 10,000 people, Peace Corps managed to somehow get three on staff.) who alerted us to recent outbreaks of Cholera in two Mozambican cities, one of which is Pemba, the coastal resort town right down the street from where I live.  Her e-mail included a warning, as well as a detailed explanation on preventative measures (wash your hands, bleach your vegetables, don’t indulge in street food, etc.), so that we can do our best to avoid getting sick with a disease that does a number on your insides.

The e-mail itself brought me back to training in Namaacha, where we spent countless hours getting a quick and dirty education on global health issues in Mozambique from those very same doctors.  In addition to the training we received, we had a constant stream of current volunteers flowing in and out of Namaacha, visiting us so they could share information about their experiences in-country.  They typically stayed for a week, and during their visits, we had the opportunity to bombard them with questions.  One of the fun questions to ask always concerned what they’ve had to deal with medically, and the responses to that question were always entertaining. Typically, the volunteers (especially those at the end of their service, having been in Moz for two years) would rattle off a laundry list of exotic diseases and ridiculous incidents they’ve had to endure while living in Nossa Terra Gloriosa, often times enduring maladies that we’d never even heard of.

Anyways, that e-mail was a stark reminder of what life is like here in Mozambique.  It’s different, and not always in a good way.  Often, these differences make life a whole lot more difficult for the people who live in these conditions.  The thought of it all weighs heavy, and it baffles me how the people here aren’t more stressed out about all the things here that there are to worry about, and about life in general.  But they don’t, and everyone here is so carefree.  Maybe it’s the massive quantities of alcohol being consumed, or maybe there’s something in the witch doctors medicine that I don’t know about.  Meanwhile, this American is sitting here shaking in his boots.  Maybe I need to go pay that witch doctor a visit…