So I probably can not tell my story in one post but here go some epic highlights.
I have been gone two weeks+ .
My daughter's senior university class had scheduled/planned for almost a year to go out of the country to do some humanitarian work. Something the senior class does every year. Previous two years were in Africa, thank God it was not Africa again this year. The stories from Africa are pretty bad.
This year was Fiji. The plan was to build a school, we ended up adding about 1500sqft to two existing buildings. Plus repaired a village community hall that was damaged by a cyclone a couple years ago.
Last November I had a chance to fill out paper work to request to go along. Not as a chaperon but as a "community member". With professors taking spouses and such there were only 4 actual open spots. Initially I was not chosen, but put as an alternate. About 6 weeks prior to leaving I received a call giving me a couple hours to decide if I could go. I made the choice to go and possibly bond with my daughter more, as she is a little closer to her mother (my wife).
I don't travel a lot, but due to opportunities that have have come up, in the last two years I have actually traveled more than the previous 30.
Let's start with 2 hour flight to LAX, California, 7 hour layover, 11 hour flight to Nadi, Fiji. 7 hour layover in the smallest airport ever seen for a 45 min flight to Labasa then a 3 hour bus ride to Nabouwalu. I can not sleep on a plane so I was up for about 35 hours. Due to the international date line it was a two day trip. Left on a Wednesday at 3pm arrived Friday about 8pm.
When we arrived the village threw us a big party.
There were 40 of us, about 30 university students, 5-6 university staff and a couple volunteers like myself.
We split into 3 groups and stayed at 3 separate villages, as 40 people staying in a village of 30-40 people would have put a huge strain on limited resources.
Saturday about 4pm the first symptoms started, Diarrhea. About 8pm I threw up violently. I was not there even 24hrs, it is possible I got something during travel (LAX must have had 500,000 people, was a damn mad house).
On the island everyone was eating and drinking the same food/water. Just saying I am not sure where it came from.
I could NOT keep anything inside me for 4 days. Less than 8oz water and 2 crackers in that time. Knowing I was in bad shape and that the hospital closed about 5pm I asked to be taken to the hospital in Nabouwalu at about 4pm Tuesday. I was pretty sure I would have lived through the night had I not went then, but the morning could have involved a 3 hour ambulance ride to the larger more capable hospital on the other side other island. I was fading fast.
I spent one night in a government run hospital that was from the 1950's. The part I was in was actually brand new, just remodeled that week, but the design and technology were from "leave it to beaver" era.
I was supposed to get 3 liters of fluids in 24 hours, after about 18hrs I had gotten about 1.3L (including some antibiotics). The IV kept stopping, about every 20 minutes my daughter had to get a nurse to clear the line. They used an extremely narrow needle in my wrist.
I felt a shit ton better and they said I could go, so I left.
Urine was still extremely dark (almost brown), but I wanted out of there and could keep fluids down so I went back to the village and drank about 2 gallons of water over the next 30ish hours. No food for almost a week, even the smell of rice made me sick.
Let me just say that "universal" health care is just as bad as we imagine it is. The villagers don't pay much if anything into the system as they don't have much income. But I looked up the Fiji tax system and those with money (business owners, people with jobs in cites) are getting taxed a shit ton. It is kind of a weird system but upwards of 50-60%.
The villagers are living a frontier life style, not unlike what moving to Montana in 1840 would be like. They live off the land, and sea.
Nabouwalu did have electricity, that also went to the other two villages we were spread across (both about 5 miles away from Nabouwalu). It was on from 7am-noon, off until 2pm and then back on until 11pm Mon-Sat. Sunday was 2 hours less, 3pm-10pm.
When I was in the hospital, they said the power would follow the same pattern UNLESS there was a body in the morgue, then they would turn on an emergency generator for the hospital to keep the refrigeration unit going. There was a body, but it got picked up about 9pm.
A lady 6 beds down from me gave birth to a child that night.
I am leaving some details out, any questions ask.
One thing, because I was not a citizen of Fiji they were pretty sure I needed to pay. In the end they did not charge me anything, because no shit, they had no billing department. No one knew how to even start the billing process, including when they called the bigger hospital 3 hours away in Labasa.
We did have limited cell service. on about day 7 my cell phone went ape shit and ended up inop a few hours later. In our group we had 7 phones go down. All had previously cracked screens. My theory is that because we live at about 5000ft and in a very dry climate, inside the screen was lower pressure than sea level and over the course of a few days humidity made its way into the phones between the display and either the outer glass or the touch sensor.
All the phones that went down, the displays all turned in to blob of screwed up pixels.
So new phone was purchased with in hours of getting home. I am going to order a new display for old phone (I have replaced a couple before) to try and retrieve some data off it if possible.
I do want to say thanks to @Tucker301 for helping me get back in here, as my old phone had the 2 step authentication code generator on it.
@powdahound76 guided me on a water filter a few months back, and it worked well. All the water I used went through that filter. One person that was with us did a project on water contamination and tested water from about 30 places including the dwelling we were staying in. It pretty much all had fecal mater in it, along with some bacteria (unknown what the bacteria was). We tested water from my filter set up and it stopped all the fecal mater/e coli/cryptosporidium.
Another member here contacted me yesterday making sure I was okay, being that he had not seen me in the forums for a couple weeks. I want to thank him as well. It is always nice when others think of you.
Glad to be home, I missed my wife and my bed. Glad to be alive. Glad to live in the USA!!
I have been gone two weeks+ .
My daughter's senior university class had scheduled/planned for almost a year to go out of the country to do some humanitarian work. Something the senior class does every year. Previous two years were in Africa, thank God it was not Africa again this year. The stories from Africa are pretty bad.
This year was Fiji. The plan was to build a school, we ended up adding about 1500sqft to two existing buildings. Plus repaired a village community hall that was damaged by a cyclone a couple years ago.
Last November I had a chance to fill out paper work to request to go along. Not as a chaperon but as a "community member". With professors taking spouses and such there were only 4 actual open spots. Initially I was not chosen, but put as an alternate. About 6 weeks prior to leaving I received a call giving me a couple hours to decide if I could go. I made the choice to go and possibly bond with my daughter more, as she is a little closer to her mother (my wife).
I don't travel a lot, but due to opportunities that have have come up, in the last two years I have actually traveled more than the previous 30.
Let's start with 2 hour flight to LAX, California, 7 hour layover, 11 hour flight to Nadi, Fiji. 7 hour layover in the smallest airport ever seen for a 45 min flight to Labasa then a 3 hour bus ride to Nabouwalu. I can not sleep on a plane so I was up for about 35 hours. Due to the international date line it was a two day trip. Left on a Wednesday at 3pm arrived Friday about 8pm.
When we arrived the village threw us a big party.
There were 40 of us, about 30 university students, 5-6 university staff and a couple volunteers like myself.
We split into 3 groups and stayed at 3 separate villages, as 40 people staying in a village of 30-40 people would have put a huge strain on limited resources.
Saturday about 4pm the first symptoms started, Diarrhea. About 8pm I threw up violently. I was not there even 24hrs, it is possible I got something during travel (LAX must have had 500,000 people, was a damn mad house).
On the island everyone was eating and drinking the same food/water. Just saying I am not sure where it came from.
I could NOT keep anything inside me for 4 days. Less than 8oz water and 2 crackers in that time. Knowing I was in bad shape and that the hospital closed about 5pm I asked to be taken to the hospital in Nabouwalu at about 4pm Tuesday. I was pretty sure I would have lived through the night had I not went then, but the morning could have involved a 3 hour ambulance ride to the larger more capable hospital on the other side other island. I was fading fast.
I spent one night in a government run hospital that was from the 1950's. The part I was in was actually brand new, just remodeled that week, but the design and technology were from "leave it to beaver" era.
I was supposed to get 3 liters of fluids in 24 hours, after about 18hrs I had gotten about 1.3L (including some antibiotics). The IV kept stopping, about every 20 minutes my daughter had to get a nurse to clear the line. They used an extremely narrow needle in my wrist.
I felt a shit ton better and they said I could go, so I left.
Urine was still extremely dark (almost brown), but I wanted out of there and could keep fluids down so I went back to the village and drank about 2 gallons of water over the next 30ish hours. No food for almost a week, even the smell of rice made me sick.
Let me just say that "universal" health care is just as bad as we imagine it is. The villagers don't pay much if anything into the system as they don't have much income. But I looked up the Fiji tax system and those with money (business owners, people with jobs in cites) are getting taxed a shit ton. It is kind of a weird system but upwards of 50-60%.
The villagers are living a frontier life style, not unlike what moving to Montana in 1840 would be like. They live off the land, and sea.
Nabouwalu did have electricity, that also went to the other two villages we were spread across (both about 5 miles away from Nabouwalu). It was on from 7am-noon, off until 2pm and then back on until 11pm Mon-Sat. Sunday was 2 hours less, 3pm-10pm.
When I was in the hospital, they said the power would follow the same pattern UNLESS there was a body in the morgue, then they would turn on an emergency generator for the hospital to keep the refrigeration unit going. There was a body, but it got picked up about 9pm.
A lady 6 beds down from me gave birth to a child that night.
I am leaving some details out, any questions ask.
One thing, because I was not a citizen of Fiji they were pretty sure I needed to pay. In the end they did not charge me anything, because no shit, they had no billing department. No one knew how to even start the billing process, including when they called the bigger hospital 3 hours away in Labasa.
We did have limited cell service. on about day 7 my cell phone went ape shit and ended up inop a few hours later. In our group we had 7 phones go down. All had previously cracked screens. My theory is that because we live at about 5000ft and in a very dry climate, inside the screen was lower pressure than sea level and over the course of a few days humidity made its way into the phones between the display and either the outer glass or the touch sensor.
All the phones that went down, the displays all turned in to blob of screwed up pixels.
So new phone was purchased with in hours of getting home. I am going to order a new display for old phone (I have replaced a couple before) to try and retrieve some data off it if possible.
I do want to say thanks to @Tucker301 for helping me get back in here, as my old phone had the 2 step authentication code generator on it.
@powdahound76 guided me on a water filter a few months back, and it worked well. All the water I used went through that filter. One person that was with us did a project on water contamination and tested water from about 30 places including the dwelling we were staying in. It pretty much all had fecal mater in it, along with some bacteria (unknown what the bacteria was). We tested water from my filter set up and it stopped all the fecal mater/e coli/cryptosporidium.
Another member here contacted me yesterday making sure I was okay, being that he had not seen me in the forums for a couple weeks. I want to thank him as well. It is always nice when others think of you.
Glad to be home, I missed my wife and my bed. Glad to be alive. Glad to live in the USA!!
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