MattD said:
Interesting... would you say it was scarcity of food, increased exercise, digestive difficulties, or something else that led to your weight loss? 20 lbs. in 8 days is pretty extreme.... equivalent to nearly a 9000 calorie deficit per day!
On another note, what else can you tell me about your trip? I wouldn't seriously go on a vacation as a weight loss plan, but I do enjoy travel!
It was a combination of things, really. It was a medical mission trip and our team worked pretty hard. We got up around 6, ate a quick breakfast, loaded bags into vans and went to the clinic sites. At the clinics we worked until 5pm and then headed back in. As soon as we got back we had dinner, then went to inventory and repack bags before bed. I don't remember ever get to sleep before midnight. The food was fine and there was plenty of it, but there never was time to sit and eat a big meal. We took bag lunches but generally gave those away (there wasn't much time to eat anyway.) I stayed healthy until just before getting back on the plane in Dar es Salaam, then I got sick and crashed hard. I stayed sick for about two weeks when I got home with some bug that pretty much just made me sick to my stomach and kept me from eating well. It was a strange experience for me. I lost a few pounds two years ago in Kenya, but ever since about the eighth grade I've weighed 162 pounds no matter what I ate or did. I hadn't been under 155 since junior high and, man, 140 pounds felt terrible!
East Africa is a beautiful place to visit and work. We flew into Dar (which is on the Indian Ocean in Tanzania) and took a bus about 7 hours into the interior to get to Iringa last year. You pass through grassy lowlands to some sort of mountainous jungle area and finally into the high plateaus and mountains where Iringa and Mbeya sit at something like 5,000 ft altitude. It's dry there in the mountains, but most of the folks outside the cities are subsistence farmers growing corn, millet, and sunflowers. There is some wildlife there, but not enough to cause problems often. There are plenty of places the highway cuts through, though, where there are still giraffes, buffalo, and lions ranging largely unimpeded. The game parks are similar to our national parks here-- no fences or barriers to keep people out or animals in. The only traffic control at the parks is the gates you drive through, but the boundaries are still very porous. Pretty much everyone we saw there in the clinics or out on the street was malnourished and anemic. Communication isn't difficult at all. Most of the kids speak a little English because it is taught from an early age in schools now. Some of the adults have picked up some English, too, but we always had interpreters with us whose English was better than mine, and most of them spoke Swahili as well as one or two of the tribal languages. Around Iringa most folks are either Maasai or Hehe, so Hehe is the local language, but everybody speaks Swahili, too. The big thing in Iringa while we were there (in June, their winter) was typhoid-- about one in three patients we saw had it. There were a few that came in for weird tropical diseases like schistosomiasis or malaria, but not nearly as many as we saw in Mombasa, Kenya, which is on the coast at sea level and therefore has alot more malaria. One of my jobs on my team was wound care, and I saw a LOT of kids with cuts on their feet and ankles. Many of the kids go barefoot and there are plenty of things to grab feet-- thorny acacia bushes, sharp rocks and sticks, metal scrap in open trash-heaps, you name it. Here's and example-- this little girl's mom said she had a bike accident:
The wound had festered for about a month and infection had set in and (according to the Doc) had begun to migrate to the bone. She got two thorough debridement sessions, clean bandages, supplies and training for her mom, and a course of cloxacillin. She was really tough-- all the kids there are.
Here's an adult Maasai male we saw:
He came in and tested positive for malaria (we contracted a lab service to come run blood smears) and also had lymphadenitis, so we got him a course of doxycyline. You can see in the picture that we were working insed a very dark mud-and-brick church, with a curtain to give the patients some privacy and all our stuff laid out on an earthen altar.
This guy below we didn't treat at all. He didn't speak a word of English or Swahili, and he wouldn't let me get close enough for an examination.
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I think I've hijacked too much already. Sorry for going so off-topic, y'all.
😳
Well, that worked out ok then. Maybe dox was at least good for an extra hug.
