Tana,
Madagascar
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
At our close-of-service conference this week, my friends and I decided that we had to have cleared three medical hurdles to be allowed to leave the country: treatment with Cipro (an extremely powerful antibiotic used primarily for gastro-intestinal problems), an exotic ailment (in my case, a bite from a rabid dog), and having a flea and its egg sack embedded in a foot. Well, good news: I can come home. Today I realized that what I had thought was a wart was, in fact, a very fertile flea and her egg sack. Since I had been treating it with anti-wart ointment for several days (*after* an examination by the american PC doctor, mind you), I'd given the flea time to build up the largest egg sack that any of my friends (who have all repeatedly had this problem before) had ever seen. Since the PC doctor didn't feel up to removing it, one of my friends with plenty of experience in the matter took it out for me while another took photos. (I will attach the pictures here tonight or tomorrow, but don't look at them unless you tend to enjoy, for example, watching surgery on the Learning Channel. Also, don't worry about having this problem if your dog gets fleas: the foot-embedding fleas are the kind that live in pig poo, which I must have encountered while wearing sandals.)
So now that this last hurdle has been crossed, I'm planning to officially leave Peace Corps in late December. Dave Castle will arrive around then for a visit -- we're planning to go to my site and to hike in the rainforest on the northeastern peninsula -- and leave in mid-January. After that, my plans are still up in the air, though I'm applying for short-term volunteer positions in Africa and Asia with American Jewish World Service's volunteer corps. I'll definitely be home by early April, so that I can visit the grad schools to which I'm accepted before committing to one, and to attend my sister's graduation from Brown in May. I'll also be spending time in Philadelphia, Providence, Boston, New York, Washington, Minneapolis, etc, on a 'seeing friends and family' tour akin to the one I took before I left. I can't wait to see you all!
Love,
Jessica
