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May 31st
“we are building a world on shadows”

I'm in an interesting place right now, mentally, physically... and the other physically. I guess I will start from the beginning of this interesting place.

So, Saturday myself, Gajin, Adam and Spencer met up in Wa. That would be the last time I got the chance to post. We had a pretty good time, chilling out and sharing stories about our placements and how they were going. We had had to split up at the internet cafe because the only internet jack working was mine, so they all went elsewhere and I stayed where I was. After I'd finished sending stuff and writing, I picked up and met up with them near downtown Wa where we went to a pretty nice guesthouse for the night. The TV had some really god awful sitcoms on, something called “wicked wicked games” that we started watching just because of how purely bad it was. I made it through the night okay, but at 6 in the morning some troubles started. I started having really bad diarrhea and had to go to the washroom around 6 times before everyone else had even woke up. I tried to drink some water to keep my hydration up, which turned out to be a mistake as the water as well as everything else I'd drank or eaten in the last 12 hours made a pretty epic return all over the floor of the washroom. It was around then the others decided it might be best if I went to a hospital. I updated Alanna on the situation, my supervisor in Burkina Faso, and got some advice on where to go in Wa to get help. We tried the clinic she had recommended first but it appeared to be closed, so we hit up the hospital in town instead. I thought it was actually a pretty nice facility all things considered. I had clean sheets on a bed in a ward shared with about 7 other beds which were variably occupied throughout the night. At various points they took people to a bed at the far end of the room and performed some minor operations. One poor kid had been bitten by a crocodile while fishing (/me recalls back to an event concerning several children swimming in crocodile infested water), so they had to stitch up his leg in all sorts of places and manners and goodness knows what. Basically my “rest” in the hospital was interrupted at various intervals by people screaming their lungs out in pain, it was fun stuff. For the most part i was probably the loudest patient there though, their tests said I'd contracted Malaria AND Typhoid. I was having epic diarrhea, stomach pains, dizziness, occasional muscle spasms, muscle soreness, all sorts of fun stuff. As I write this I've recovered from the malaria but still supposedly have Typhoid. I say supposedly because apparently the tests for these often get false positives, but I was retested in Bole when I got back 3 days later (Spent a total of 3-4 days in Wa, most of which was in the hospital). In Bole I took a place at the guest house my coach and I had stayed in the first night in town. It wasn't the cleanest place in the world but I needed the toilet (I learned the hard way that free range and diarrhea are not a good mix). I spent two nights there before Gajin got me a place at a brand new guest house right across from my office, so I wouldn't have to walk as far to get to work or to get water, as the petrol station was directly next door as well. It was pretty nice, had it had running water it would have been a lot nicer. The bed had something resembling satin sheets going on, there was a toilet and mirror and everything, air freshners in the washroom, etc. The running water thing was key though. Instead of relativiely clean clear water I was pouring water out of filthy jerry cans into a bucket. I let the particles settle to the bottom before washing but still had an interesting scent going on after my showers.In any case, while staying here I began having serious panic attacks. So I updated my coach and supervisor about this as well, at first I thought I'd be okayish, then they got worse, so I thought I'd be able to last 3 more weeks or so. Then they got really worse. So... now I'm in Tamale, less than a week later. They've put me up in a guest house with air conditioning, running water, a fan, and pretty comfy beds, and are making me eat western food. The staff seem to think that I am suffering from culture shock, which admittedly is very very similar to Generalized Anxiety Disorder so I can certainly understand. My feeling is that I probably do have culture shock but it is a minor to moderate contributor to whats going on, or perhaps was the initial catalyst. As the anxiety attacks get worse I've begun to feel depression and other fun and interesting emotions as well, so I'm honestly not sure what my future here is at the moment. I've decided to treat it as though it were culture shock and we will see what the result is, but I'm pretty far along in the process and pretty uncertain. Pretty scared too, to be honest. These are some of the worst anxiety attacks I've ever had, and I have yet to recover from the nervous breakdown I had last April. Having another nervous breakdown would probably be a bad plan. I do want to stay. I love the work I'm doing, I like Ghana, I like waking up to Muslim prayers in the morning and listening them lullaby me to sleep. The people here are absurdly friendly and easy to talk to and will watch your back even if you don't know them that well, which is pretty much the ideal kind of person for me and the sort of people I wish Canadians were. If I fully adapted to Ghana I honestly think I'd like it better than home.It's just that there are a lot of things getting. My OCD has been going wild here, especially as the anxiety attacks get worse. I just washed my hands 3 times, and had to wipe down my laptop cause there was like, a tiny smudge of dirt on the fingerpad. Other things have been getting to me as well. I dunno, i definitely have the mind for the work here but I'm not sure I have the mind for the world here, if that is sensible enough for people to understand. I'm planning on working with my coach Wayne to try and treat it as though it were purely culture shock and we'll see where we go from there. I dunno. I'm not getting my hopes up or anything just in case. Basically I'm a mental wreck right now and not improving, I had the worst panic attack pretty much ever this morning. One sign of a panic attack is that it feels like a heart attack, except this hasn't been something common to my panic attacks, only the absolute worst ones. This morning I felt like my heart was going to burst. There are some other issues going on but those are more private and definitely not something to share on a public blog =P Suffice it to say I'm not doing so hot.

On the plus side I did my first presentation for work. It went reasonably well I suppose, I'm not terribly good at presentations to begin with and this one was done while suffering from Typhoid and panic attacks, so yeah, interesting combination. In attendance were 3 AEA's out of the 5 in my district (one was sick, one was away), most of the district officers, and some members of the farmer group society from my village. They seemed for the most part really interested, one of the officers seemed to be falling asleep, I'm hoping that's not my fault lol. I was also having some crazy problems with my right ear, dunno what was going on there. Felt like the ear drum had burst or it had decompressed or something. In any case, it went well! I set my office up with all the forms and things my AEA's need too, so that they can at least start working on it while I'm gone. The farmer group wanted copies of the cards as well which was interesting. This is the same group I posted about last, that is having some finance troubles.

Soze, not much else been happening really, just been trying to deal with my mental disorders and physical diseases. Will see where things go from here, I'm just taking it as it comes as best as I can at the moment. That was a lot of “as”'s.