Bad day

Written November 25th, 2012

Today was not very good, a whole buch of little things went wrong which all built up into a shitty day.
I started off my morning with a dislocated (?) jaw at 4 this morning (I now consistently wake up around 4am [and getting earlier and ealier] and lay in bed for a while and read. I have never been good at sleeping in but now it is immpossible). I went to let out a giant yawn and then discovered my mouth wouldn’t close. Fun, right? I have been having jaw issues for the past few months. I noticed that after a yawn when I went to close my mouth it took a second for everything to work itself into place, but never more then a second. But this morning it was full on stuck open. This isn’t lock jaw, that’s when your mouth is stuck closed (right?) but still pretty sucky. I had the thought of “do I call the Peace Corps doctors now or try to tough it out until the slightly less horrible hour of 6am”. Then I imagined how incredible horrible a 5-6 hour taxi brousse ride to the capital with my jaw stuck open and proceeded to panic. After a few akward jaw movements and some and some help from my hands I finally got it to pop back into place and close. It hurt like hell and is still sore tonight. I just keep on reminding myself not to yawn and everything will be fine. And of course, as we all know, nothing makes you want to yawn more than thinking about yawning all day. No good.
Then, when I went to get out of bed, I broke it. Now my bead breaks all the time so it is not that unusual. The crossboards are too short and for the first couple of months here everytime I would roll over in bed they would come unlodged and my matress would fall. Now I have those boards glued in and have to redo it every month or so but it works okay. But this time the little lip that holds the crossbars in place is broken. I haven’t fixed it yet and will be in bed in about an hour. I might be snuggling with the cockraochs on the floor tonight.

Broken piece-of-crap bed.

And then, horror of all horrors, my kindle broke (I refuse to say I broke it….). See the next blog post, this deserves an entry all its self.
To top it off I had/am having an ethical delima. There is a woman who lives a couple of houses behind me who I love and I really want to join my women’s gardening project. She has the perfect yard and four skinny little kids who could use some more veggies in their diet (her too, she had just had the baby when I first met her and I thought she looked very healthy [ie: fat] but now she has lost the pregnancy weight and looks skinnier and skinnier everyday). When I told her she should join she seemed very embarassed and said she couldn’t afford it (the women have to pay 25% of the cost of the tools, if they choose to buy everything [fertilizer, seeds, watering can, shovel, rake, and fork] it comes out to about $5, the deposit that is due next week is about $1.50). Another woman then went on to tell me how horrible this womans life is. Her husband left here and her youngest baby (about 8 months old) is very obviously developmentally delayed. First off, his head is abnormally big. Also, he is about the same age as my former neighbor’s baby Fandresena (he is actually a bit older) and while Fandresenda is babeling, standing, dancing, and starting to walk, this other baby (Volana) is just getting a hold of the using his neck to support his head thing. So this woman is alone, poor, and has a child who is quickly growing into toddler size strapped to her back for the forseeable future. Here is the dilema, I really, really, really, just want to give this woman the money so she can join the group. It is freaking $5! But there are dilemas. I could never openly just give her the money. It just now got to the point where I don’t get daily request from people to give them money or things. The other woman would certialy be jealous and it would start a bad reputation for me. Then I thought, well maybe I could have her do some work for me and then I could pay for her. But, she has this baby and is super limited in what she can do. Then I thought, well maybe her older daughters can do some wok for me (ages 11 and 9) but then I would be making these children work… I am still undecided and horribly conflicted.