I just spent almost the entire past week in consolidation. I really shouldn’t complain - 24 hour electricity, flushing toilet, TV, air conditioning, no cleaning dishes... I even had bacon one morning! But best of all I got to spend time with fellow PCVs. Still, we all just wanted to be in our sites... building stoves, giving classes, meeting with our youth groups, finishing aqueducts, or perhaps petting our dogs/horses/cats.

Tomas, gracias a dios, didn’t hit as hard as expected in Haiti or the DR. But I guess when the government is responsible for your safety and well being, they’re willing to take extreme measures and put up upwards of 100 people in hotels for 5 nights.

Before I was scooped up out of my site, I was giving cholera talks at the school in the morning and night sessions. In fact, two Fridays ago, PC consolidated us for cholera training. The purpose was to first scare us and then inform us. I’d say they achieved both. They told us the Center for Disease Control announced that there is a 100% probability that the epidemic would make it’s way to the DR. It’s inevitable considering how the countries share the same watershed for the whole length of the border.

Here’s the two most important things about cholera:

1- it’s a bacteria

2- you die from dehydration

The bacteria spreads only from feces to mouth, so say a latrine with infected poo gets in the water stream and contaminates the water you drink or the vegetables you eat. Or maybe an infected person poops and doesn’t wash their hands and handles your food or shakes your hand. Flies can also carry the bacteria from poo to food. All this means we can easily control cholera through proper hygiene and cooking/cleaning food and purifying the water we drink. The other good news is that since it is a bacteria, once a person is infected it can be killed easily with antibiotics.

I spoke bout all these things and more with about 12 different groups of students. It was fun teaching them rehydration recipes and making them repeat “Caca-a-Boca” with puzzled looks on their faces. It’s also quite a change because this information is potentially life saving as opposed to teaching Photoshop - a program used to edit photos - while fun, is not so vital to survival.