My Brand New Haircut!

So I won’t be making a youtube video about it…and it might not make it onto the cover of vogue…but today I got a brand new haircut!

You see…the plan was for me to get a haircut BEFORE going to Africa. Something simple, that would be easy to wash and easy to maintain. We all know that showering is such a burden to me, that showing with a bucket just seems impossible. But then before I left, I got too distracted with going away parties and making myself look like a fool in EMS and Costco, that I just didn’t have the time to get a haircut.

So off to Rwanda I went with my long, split endy, unwashed hair, un-highlighted, somewhat permed hair.

I am proud to report that I showered more times in my first week in Rwanda than I did during the average week during Senior Spring. But I was still able to recognize that it would become a burden in the future, when I was not so energetic about showering and running and getting dressed and waking up early. So I jumped at the opportunity when Peace Corps Jenny appeared, professional hair clippers in hand, ready to cut Lauren’s (Dartmouth ’08) hair.

The five Peace Corps girls visiting Musanze for the weekend (they got it off for the election...apparently only CCHIPs has muzungu work days. I think a vacation might have helped us better appreciate the Rwandan culture) had set up a salon on our front porch by the time I got back from my run. (In my bitterness that it was a muzungu only work day, I left early to go for a run. It was a bad run…I went to the track to do a sprint workout and got those black dot things that happen before you pass out. Damned altitude.) The idea of a haircut was a very exciting prospect…so I quickly showered (hot water today!) and ran out for my place in line.

After the usual array of questions – Where do you part your hair? I don’t know. / How long do you want it? Long enough. – I shut my eyes and let her go for it. As happens during every hair cut, the snips of hair that fell to the ground looked a little longer than I was expecting, and she asked me awkward questions about my love life (nonexistent. Same with hers.). It lacked in the blow drying at the end that makes any crappy hair cut look amazing, but as I explained to her…I’m pretty enough without it.

Overall, I think it was very successful! As I explained to Jenny (not Fisher), it was definitely worth more than a $15 supercuts cut. As she explained to me, she was impressed I let a rando cut my hair when I was only a week into Rwanda. And then we agreed on the payment of one margarita to come at a later date.

Since I don’t have a camera, I can’t show you my brand new haircut…but this picture from 6^th form kind of captures the new length and style (that’s right – she styled it too!).

My brand new haircut -- In 6th form.

Exercise

Did a little too much to my body today.

After not exercising for possibly a month – unless you count teaching myself how to skull in Canada – I decided that it was time to actually go for a run this morning.  In an intelligent fashion, I did my background research and learned that I should not run at the track (because it grew a crowd) and that, in general, the girls don’t like going for runs because all the little kids run along next to you…and then make fun of you for being slow. This was the reason for my ambitious 5:30 wake up call. Which didn’t work exactly as planned…but I was on the road by 6:30am.

No children followers. And not nearly as scary/intimidating as I thought it would be. It actually went quite well…the only downside was that there was literally no place to do abs when I got back because the driveway is stone and all the floors in the house are concrete. Ouch.

But if that wasn’t enough…we ended our work day today with our first SOCCER GAME!

Here’s my opinion on soccer: I hate it. I have never ever been able to understand how you can both DO something with your feet AND run with your feet at the same time. Moreover, it’s boring. While I enjoyed having an excuse to start drinking at 10am with plenty of company during the World Cup…I prefer sports with a little more action. And I’m just really bad at it. As a general rule, I don’t like things that I’m not good at.

But alas, I want to make friends…so I pretended to be *so excited* when the idea of post-work soccer came up. I ran to my room and threw on my shorts and t-shirt from that morning (asking my roommate if I’m allowed to wear shorts in public), and jumped in the back of the car.

I was warned that we’d be surrounded by kids who wanted to play with us…so the teams wouldn’t be made out of just the 5 of us that were playing. So I was a little disappointed when we walked into the stadium and were not the immediate center of attention. In fact, we made it all the way over to a little plot with nobody to join in with us…1 league game and 3 pick games were already going. Sure enough, though, they did come.

Zack, who is now an expert at this, split up the teams. His strategy is to put an even number of big kids on each team and trust that they will kick off the little ones (I guess they’re less fun to play with?). The first half of the game, though, was still chaos. Except for the 2 other foreigners on my team, I had no idea who to pass the ball to. Not that it mattered, because I couldn’t even really direct a pass. At this point, it was probably worse than a game of 2^nd grade soccer. Not only were we all following the ball around the field, but everybody was fighting for it because we didn’t know who was on our team.

Once the sun set though (~6pm), it became an entirely different game. Half the kids were called home, leaving only about 12 on the field. I was able to keep track of who was on my team…and they actually passed to me! Then they would quickly become disappointed with me. As an athlete with natural field sense, I often found myself open (or maybe I was just off-sides?)…so they’d pass to me a lot. I would then either kick the ball directly to the other team, or blatantly hand ball it. I did have a few flukes of luck that made me look good and encouraged me to want to go back, but mostly a lot of frustration that I didn’t have a stick in my hand.

Overall though, soccer was actually a really fun experience and I’m psyched to go back for more. Even though the 12 year olds could definitely have kicked our butts, they played down to our level (and then would dribble through us all and score a goal). They were incredibly nice—gave you a hand up if you fell down and shook hands with us all at the end. They were also really fun and lighthearted…using their little English to keep the game going (“1 minute!” “5 minutes!” “50 minutes!”) until it was long past dark (6:30pm)…we actually walked home in the pitch black.

And now, I’m exhausted, watching Team America, and gchatting with my 2 faves (hey guys). To further explain away my exhaustion, I’m just going to continue to blame the altitude and not try any of this again for another week.

Roughing It

The whole neighborhood had plans to spend Labor Day Weekend on the Eldred’s island in Canada. I’d heard a lot about this island…the place where Rope Ferrians go to “rough it” with no cell service, no electricity, and only enough ice to keep two cases cold at a time. For various reasons, I’d never been, but I figured that this would be a perfect opportunity for me to test out my roughingness ability in preparation for the Peace Corps: would I be able to light a kerosene lamp in the middle of the night in order to go to the bathroom? Would I be able to bear the lukewarm-fire-heated “hot tub”?

Short answer: maybe not, if I had appendicitis.

A few days before leaving, I woke up (or…stayed in bed) with a massive hang over that literally took me out for the entire day. This was strange and something that’s never happened to me before. But my mom took no sympathy so I just wallowed in pain. I finally got a little curious when the pain continued into the next day. No way. No hangover is two days long. Right? As an athlete, I’ve always been a little hyper-sensitive about aches and pains. (I’ve also always been curious if I have an incredibly low pain tolerance or if I’m just in touch with my body…but that’s one of those things that’s just really hard to figure out. Like…you can’t trade pain with someone to see how you’d react to what they’re feeling.) Anyways, I had a little bit of a fear that this pain was in just the right place for it to develop into appendicitis. Which would not be a-okay while roughing it in Canada.

Finally, 24 hours later, my mom felt enough pity on me to take me to the hospital where I was diagnosed with the UTI from hell. Given antibiotics, and sent up on my way to Canada.

Coincidentally, at this time I was also reading my newest Peace Corps memoir, First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria, which is about a Peace Corps volunteer who quit, only to return to Africa a year later, following her husband on a job. The chapter I was suffering through reading while driving the miserable eight (five – ha!) hour drive to this island was about her getting pregnant in Uganda. The humor in the chapter was that not one of the doctors could confirm or deny the pregnancy for her. They all said that she was “a little bit pregnant.” (It’s on the back of the book jacket, so you don’t even have to read the whole thing to confirm this if you don’t believe me.) Of course, the fear here is that she could have had an ectopic pregnancy.

A symptom of which would be pain in the lower abdomen. Similar to pain that could be mistaken for appendicitis. Or maybe mistaken on a urine sample as a UTI????????

The author goes into some detail about the fear of having an ectopic pregnancy in a place like Uganda…or like on an island without electricity in a country with socialized medicine….

Now…I’m on birth control, I use condoms, and apparently am very unattractive because I haven’t had sex in like three months. So realistically, an ectopic pregnancy would have been impossible…but I was obviously asking myself a lot of “what ifs” as I laid convulsing in chills on the beautiful and warm sun porch on the island without electricity. And even though I kept on eating and drinking and taking those antibiotics they gave me, my fever kept on rising and rising and my vomit bursts got closer and closer getting to the point where I just couldn’t take the antibiotics anymore. (Is that an over share? Or was the pregnancy part an over share?)

So ultimately mommy and I gave up roughing it and packed up the multiple suit cases we had brought to rough it for the weekend and headed back to the marina and back to the US and non-Obama-care medicine where I was ultimately treated for a kidney infection.

Moral of the story: damn am I happy that the US was only five hours away from roughing it. And what am I going to do if I get a kidney infection in freaking Kazakhstan??