Staying hydrated and hyped

The past two weeks have each faced their different challenges for me to conquer. In some cases it’s been a long, painful battle, but my reward for making it through the last two weeks is making a trip to the Perhentian Islands for scuba diving lessons with the rest of the Terengganu people. It’ll be the first time we’re all together since state level orientation ended and I’m really excited to see everyone.

So last week was solving the issue of staying hydrated. I had caught some sort of stomach virus and as a result was able to keep very little in my stomach at any given time. This caused severe dehydration as well as some truly awful stomach pains. Hydration is always a tricky issue here because of the extreme heat this Michigan body is not built to handle. It’s not even the hot season yet…anyways besides the heat you also need to keep up on boiling your water or get to the store to buy water. With three of us in the house we boil approximately a gallon of water twice a day. We’re getting into a routine with water boiling but we still run out at times which is never good. Back to last week—the virus meant I needed more water than usual, but I was not familiar with the symptoms I was experiencing. For your reference fever and dizziness is a possible sign you need more water.

Now as many of you know I spent the majority of my undergrad studying water policies, but I don’t think I have ever thought about water as consistently as I have in the past month. Again being from Michigan has given me a skewed understanding of water access. Yes, for the last four years I have read more than my fair share of articles on the lack of water,  in Uganda I lived with a family that had to walk to the well everyday to get water, but I don’t think it every really hit home until I was in charge of providing my own  clean water. Malaysia has achieved their water MDG to have the amount of people without access to improved water sources by 2015. According to the 2010 ASEAN MDG report, 100 percent of Malaysians have access to improved water sources and 95% have access to improved sanitation, which is really good compared to many other countries in the region and the world. It makes me wonder, if I’m having this much trouble staying hydrated in a country where it is relatively easy to get access to clean water how much worse can it be else where? Two last thoughts: I wish I would have helped Kaka, my Ugandan brother, with the water chore more and I am grateful for the Great Lakes.

Staying hyped is hard to do, but it’s what the students expect. I’ve know been in Malaysia for two months and life has fallen into a normal routine. Wake up at 6am, shower, breakfast, drive to school, teach, entertain myself between classes, after school class, nap, explore, dinner, hang out, bed by 11pm. With this kind of schedule it’s hard to stay excited at all times but the students still expect me to be the fun, energetic, foreign teacher every time I see them in or out of class and are disappointed every time I’m acting tired. This week was especially hard to keep my spirits up as all of my classes were canceled so that the students could take their exams. I have started coloring with the primary students that get done with classes before the secondary students and really working on my Bahasa Malaysia skills. One of the primary school girls has even taken upon herself to be my personal Bahasa Malaysia teacher. However she is not very patient with my pronunciation abilities. I know that the trip to the Island this weekend will really help to refresh me again and then I will only be teaching for four days before spring break where I will be visiting Burma with a fellow ETA. I’m really excited for this trip because when I was living in Thailand I was on the Burmese border, but at the time US citizens were not allowed across. I’m excited that I will finally get to see the country I was so close to entering but never could.

I’m making you, my readers, a promise so that I will hopefully follow through on it. From now on whenever a class is canceled I will use that time to research my thesis topic! I will. Pinky promise.