I'm OK, It is OK

t occurs to me that my last few emails have been pretty heavy (for which i make no apologies- this is sudan and life here is heavy) and a lot of you seem concerned about my mental well-being lately. i just wanted to reassure you that i'm ok. there are days that are awful, days that are neutral and days that are good. i just don't tend to write about the days that are good because those would make for very short stories..."today i lay on the couch and listened to my ipod. the end". rest assured that i do not wake up to dead bodies every morning, nor do i go to bed every night covered in the blood of the innocent. not that there aren't days like that, obviously there are, but they are in the minority.

the flies and the spiders seem to be in some sort of reproductive race to see who can take over sudan first. to be honest, i don't know who to root for. yes, spiders are of satan, but at least they don't spend hours dive-bombing my ears and nostrils as i'm trying to read. and it's a good thing that they don't because i can basically guarantee that the day a spider dive-bombs any part of me will be the day i die of a heart attack. i know that as a Christian i shouldn't believe in karma, but i had a seriously karmic moment the other day. there was a spider on the screen and i had a rolled up magazine that i was using to kill flies. i went to hit it, completely missed and hit the screen beside it. the screen then acted like a trampoline and bounced the spider right off it, at me. those are the moments that make naiman's quote "it almost doesn't make sense why someone doesn't have a camera on us all the time" come to mind.

thank you for your concern. as you can see, i am still ok enough to be preoccupied with spiders. it can't be all that bad :)

in case you're wondering about the cause of my sudden psychological upswing, it's quite simple really. i came home from work last sunday and went to bed, and i didn't get up till wednesday. i tried to go to work thursday morning, broke out in a cold sweat, went home and went back to bed till saturday. another fever knocked me out of commission and i got 5 days of desperately needed rest. aside from the fact that i couldn't eat (and still can't) and therefore lost more weight, i feel SO much better. speaking of losing weight, we don't have mirrors here so i had no idea how much i had lost until i got to work on saturday morning. my staff looked at me in horror and hawa says "amy! you become small!". they stand around me, clucking in dismay, running their fingers over my now-prominent collarbones while i laugh and say that i stand almost 6 feet tall and there isn't a single category in the world in which i would qualify as small. after that, no matter what i try to do (for instance, roll up the mat at the end of the day) they stop me and say "you are still weak!" and shove me towards the nearest chair so they can do it for me. i then sit in the chair, roll my eyes and remind them that i had a fever, not a heart transplant. they didn't stop shooting me worried glances out of the corners of their eyes until today when i arrived at work and treated them to a spontaneous ballet recital. no, i don't know ballet. i took one class when i was 3 and pretty much all we did was run around the room pretending to be butterflies.
alright, 24 days till i leave for my vacation in kenya. i think i can make it, i think i can make it, i think i can make it...