Nauseous Noelle

My FB Status February 22, 2012 3:00 pm
It wouldn't be a true-blue-Peru adventure unless one of us got food poisoning and spent 9 pm-3 am throwing up anything and everything they've ever eaten...and then some...and then spent the next 12 hours sleeping it off. Good thing I have awesome, understanding roommates whom I love dearly! In the meantime, I'm swearing off rice and potatoes.


So although it's not a pleasent story, I must document quite possibly the most unenjoyable part of my trip thus far.

On Tuesday night I was exhausted. We were eating our dinner of nachos at about 7:30 pm and I kept falling asleep at the dinner table. We were also trying to figure out our flight/travel/tour plans for our last  week here in the most cost effective way possible, so I was trying extra hard to stay awake. 

At around 9, we moved our discussion into our living/dining/bedroom so that we could use a whiteboard and I could lay down in our bed.

And that's when my tummy went into revolt. I remember telling Brittany I was going to throw up, so she got me a bag and I think I fell asleep after that. From that point on, I went on to throw up three more times through out the night. I'd feel it coming up, force myself to wake up...and almost always make it to a throw up bag.... almost :) 

Oh how I just wanted to be in a warm home with my mom taking care of me. Instead, I was in a giant, freezing cold room made of concrete and had a SAINT of a roommate talking care of me. Seriously, Brittany is amazing. She'd take my bag of throw-up, pour it's contents down the toilet and bring me a clean bag.

Finally, by the third time I had thrown up, I had nothing left in my stomach (we had eaten A TON that day) and that's when the dry heaves started (at least I think that's what it's called when your body tries to throw up, but you have nothing left in your stomach) ohhhh that was not fun.

At 3 am I had had enough and I was feeling way bad for my roommates that I had woken up at least 10 times in the past 5 hours. My energy was shot but I managed to ask if anyone had any medicine. Saint like roommate number two, Abigail, got up and out of bed AT 3 AM to find me some PeptoBismal.

It was the chewable kind (which I can hardly stand) but I was desperate. So I took some and went back to bed and slept until 3 pm the next day :)

I slept and slept and slept and slept and woke up periodically to Jhonny or Feliciana's voices.

When I finally got up and out of bed, it was move out time. Luckily, most of my things were already packed and ready to go. So I loaded up my suitcases/duffle/backpack and headed outside to wait for the bus in the rain. It was the longest I had stood up all day and it was not enjoyable.

We got to our vacation home for the week and made us some dinner of.... you guessed it.. rice and potatoes.

We skyped with Liz and Aleksi's awesome mom and then it was time for bed. I was OUT. Woke up this morning, took my first shower in wayyy too long and sacked back out on the bed.

I thought I was done with my tummy troubles...but apparently I wasn't. It started back up this morning and has ceased to ...cease

Sorry this post is poorly worded and and don't super interesting, I'm drifting in and out of consciousness as we speak, so if this doesn't make sense.. you know why.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Death By Way of Confession

If I happen to die during my time here, I blame it purely on our night of confessions.

I know I’ve mentioned this hundreds of times. But our house is covered in mold. Mainly our ceilings. Black mold, green mold, grey mold, fuzzy mold, And to be honest, it scares me to death! I’ve been reading up/studying it and have found that when you breathe in mold it begins to colonize in your lungs and grow there!  And then I’m sure, shortly after… you die. I also read that you are a bit safer if you don’t disrupt the mold by trying to scrape/scrub it off. Brittany however is just itching to get to work on the ceiling and take off that mold in any way that she can. So I have had to sit her down and make her PINKY PROMISE not to disturb the mold. And she has obliged, because she knows how much I would really love to not die!

This picture does not do it justice. It was taken on our first day here. Since then, it has multiplied 100 fold. No joke.

Anyways, last night was a night to remember (and it will be, because we got it all on video). We were whipping egg whites (by hand) to try and make them into some sort of dessert, but we were not having very much success. So I whipped out my video camera and asked the other girls questions and what not about our time here. While we were talking, Abby let a confession slip. 

We were telling our video diary about the mold, and Brittany was telling it about how I would not let her touch the mold. Then Abby says, “We’ll blame it on Feliciana!” I didn’t really catch on to what was going on until the confession totally slipped out.

Here’s what it is: That morning, Abigail had run upstairs (where our bedrooms are) to grab something and found Feliciana, with a broom in hand, scraping mold off of the ceiling!!! AKA: Horribly disrupting the mold and sending it into the air where it could oh so easily find it’s way right into my lungs!!!!

Abigail was shocked when she saw this and needed to tell somebody, so she told Brittany and made her promise not to tell me. How sweet is that? She knew that I would be totally freaked out if I knew that Feliciana was taking a broom to the moldy ceiling every day! So she didn’t tell me, until it slipped out last night.  Brittany topped it off with her line of the night, “Yeah Noelle, you were going to be saved by ignorance, but now that you know… you’re going to die”

And it was downhill from there. As soon as Abigail’s confession slipped out, Brittany says, “Wait I have one! Yesterday, when I took the chicken out of our fridge for dinner… it dropped all over the floor! But we still ate it!”

Then Abigail replied, “Remember when Pedro gave us those chocolates? Well… I dropped those all over the floor!” And then went on and on from there (most confessions of which cannot be posted here J )

So we’re a bit worse off than I thought we were…but alas, we’re still up and kicking and having a great time!

Also, have I mentioned lately how great Abigail and Brittany are? Cause they are purely amazing. We are 3 COMPLETELY different people. The more we get to know each other and see each other in different situations the more we realize how opposite we are. But the compilation of the three of us is something beautiful. We truly complement each other so nicely.  And I love them!

One Week Celebration!

Last night we celebrated our one week anniversary in Peru. We partied hard, get this:

We treated ourselves to one funsized candybar each… BEFORE dinner! Best Reeses cup I have ever tasted in my entire life.  Then we made tuna veggie patties for dinner along with fresh avocado and pineapple. We also broke into our milk (which is chalked full of sugar!) After that we popped us some popcorn over the gas burner and covered it in cinnamon sugar. 

We took it upstairs and the three of us plopped down onto Abigail and Mine’s bed and cuddled up in our blankets and ate popcorn as we watched 2 full episodes of Full House. It was bliss. 

By around nine o clock (we have a strict 10 pm bedtime) we turned off the laptop and laid in bed and swapped more boy stories. The cute ones, the embarrassing ones and I shared my “Worst Date Ever” story. I felt like I did pretty much most the talking last night, (Abigail has been going to town with boy stories the last couple days ago, and we still need to get more out of Brit) but it was so fun to remember some of my stories and share them. I have some pretty good ones.

And then I believe we were all asleep by 10:30. Which is pretty impressive seeing as Abigail and I have stayed up talking til about 11:30-12:00 the last several nights. It was a great way to celebrate our one-week-iversasry. Don’t worry, we have even bigger plans for our one month anniversary. We might even plan our weddings that night….oooooo!

Sheer Exhaustion and Our Very First FHE

We had our first FHE this past Monday. It was an exhausting day to say the least. We sorted through lentils for hours ran around with the kids and then had to go into Cajamarca (a huge city) and try and figure out what the man who took us was saying. When we talk to any adults, like Hermano Sandro, they usually direct their words to me, so I am in charge of trying to figure out what they say and then try to figure out an appropriate response.

After about an hour of that, I feel like I have just sat in the testing center for 3 hours taking a test that I knew nothing about, yet I needed to try super hard because my life and two other lives depended on it. It is the most mentally exhausting and draining thing I have ever done. 

 As soon as we got off the bus from Cajamarca I found a chair and just sat. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think, and when I went to offer a prayer on our dinner I couldn’t even find the correct English words to begin the prayer. I felt as if my brain had literally turned to mush.

After a lovely dinner of dry fish, celery, bean sprouts and mushrooms  we went upstairs to our bedroom for FHE. We wanted to sing our opening song in Castellano so we went to LDS.org and just picked a random one. It happened to be “Lead Kindly Light” Appropriate song for our situation? I think so! “The night is dark and I am far from home, lead thou me on.” We then read out of the second half of 2^nd Nephi 4 and applied what we read to ourselves and found ways that we could use it to improve our time here. For our closing song we sang, “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go Dear Lord” I’ve come to LOVE the words in all three verses.

For activity we accidentally stayed up all night to tell each other about our past and current love life situations. Without giving too much away, lets just say that I have never laughed harder in my entire life. Turns out we've all been in the same boat in multiple ways and we're a lot more alike than we thought. Perfect way to end an exhausting day.