All the teachers are sick. All of them except me. Since we've been here, I've accidentally swallowed a mouthful of tap water (when brushing my teeth, I just defaulted to the... well, the default) eaten sugar with ants in it, poured a pile of what I thought was salt into my palm and ate it, only to discover that it was MSG (something important to know, actually: they often have MSG as a table seasoning here - they sell it in bags in the market along with salt and sugar) and that there was no place to spit it out, stepped in untold amounts of bird shit (with flip-flops on, but still), eaten an entire bar of Swiss chocolate in five minutes after not having eaten any chocolate at all for three weeks, peeled fruit with dirty hands and then eaten it (there's no soap at the school, so you just have to make do with water), had to use a bathroom every day that 3 and 4 year old Early Learners pee all over, had seven teachers coughing in my face for four hours for a week, eaten food out of a kitchen that the following thing happened in yesterday - a gigantic cockroach was scurrying around the communal cabinet, acting very agitated, and suddenly a rat darted out from a hole somewhere deep within the wall and pounced on the cockroach and ate it - and, I'm sure, more disgusting things that I can't think of because, out of necessity, they have become rote. And it's creepy: I feel extremely, extremely, extremely healthy. Everyone else is languishing in the heat, but I feel like I'm sweating out all my toxins, whatever those may be, every time I move, and it's ceased feeling unnatural to be sweating all the time. My skin, too, is suddenly perfect. It's either that my malaria medication is also often prescribed as an acne medication (which is true) or that the tropical air is good for me or maybe both, but I look entirely different to myself when I look in the mirror. Tan, kind of, but not in a skin-cancery tanning-booth Florida way; skinnier, true, but not like I'm wasting away - more like I'm not eating hot dogs and potato chips and, instead, am spending all my time tensing my muscles holding on to a motorcycle and praying for my life as Nick attempts to shift into fourth while flying down a 10% grade on the left side of the road with a sheer drop on one side and disco-taxies on the other as cars and bikes are braking ahead for the red light that the city, cunningly, has placed directly after a steep turn.
I guess the main point to take away from all this is this: if I don't die while I'm here, I will return healthy and strong and awesome. But both options are equally plausible.