Whoa! Where has this week gone? Actually the past two weeks have been a blur to me. When you love what you are doing, it is easy to let time fly by! But these last two weeks have flown by for many reason in addition to that!
For one week straight I was in bed sick (No it has nothing to do with Ebola. That outbreak is in West Africa which is nowhere near where I am). I started the week with a really annoying sinus infection and an equally annoying stomach ulcer. Somehow I managed to upset two areas of my body at the same time. That had me in bed and highly medicated for Monday-Thursday. Thursday night/Friday Morning took a turn for the worse. I managed to pick up a stomach virus that had me up all night and crying to go to the doctor’s office in the morning. At one point it felt like someone had a death grip on my stomach and was squeezing everything out of me at once (that is the pretty way to describe what was happening). To settle my stomach enough for me to hold my medicine down, the doctor had to give me a shot in my butt. I have no idea what he shot into me but I know that I felt ten times better (which was still bad) about a hour later. I slept the whole weekend trying to get better enough to come back to work on Monday. I wasn’t feeling 100% by Monday but at least I had enough energy to get out of bed so off to work I went! It felt good to get out of the house because everybody else is slowly catching the stomach bug I had so there are too many germs here for me.
The amazing thing about all of that is the cost of me getting better. My doctor’s appointment on Monday cost me R380 which is roughly $38. The bag of medicine I received to treat everything cost me R368 which is roughly $36. My second visit to the doctor, including the injection into my behind, cost me R393 which is roughly $39. Finally, my second round of medicine cost me R130 which is roughly $13. Thinking about that in the context of ZAR (South Africa’s currency), those trips to the doctor would have been expensive. But I still see things in USD and I would have paid ten times more for everything I had to pay for last week! Health care is extremely affordable here so far.
This week back at work has been smooth. There is something that was said to me yesterday that made me think more about the impact the organizations I work for make. Yesterday, I was doing the finances and putting everything into the spreadsheet as it needs to be done every month. While in the process of entering everything in, it is easy to just see numbers and a process that is taking up your time. But if you look a bit deeper into what you are doing, you can see every fundraiser, every donor, every event, and everything the organization has done that month to affect change in the communities we work in. You get to see the action behind what we are asking people to donate to and that is the coolest thing to me! After looking at the spreadsheet that way, my day began to feel a lot less like work.
Over all, that weather is slowly getting better here but it is still freezing to me most days. I am back healthy again and I have picked up plenty of vitamin C and different things to fight off sickness. This wouldn’t be my blog if something hasn’t happened to an electronic of mine but my local phone (not my expensive Samsung that I protect with my life) was knocked out of my hand while I was texting and never to be see again. But I bought a really cheap phone so it is not a problem to get another one at some point. I just need to get a bungee cord connected to all of my electronics so if someone tries to take them I can just snatch it back up to me. I am determined to have an incident free life/blog soon!
Oh and this is the first August in YEARS that I will not be heading back to school! This is weird and also means I have to start paying my student loans soon, Yikes!
Sorry, no pictures this time but the new initiative I am fundraising for could use your help so please follow this link to learn all about it: http://www.happyafricafoundation.org/project-detailed.html?pcode=30