10/15/12-The Plateau Of Lackluster

I think I'm hitting one of my service plateaus. During PST, we were given this chart that forecasted our general feelings of mental health and well-being throughout our whole service. I've never really hit an ultimate low, well not yet, but I think I'm heading towards a thumb twiddling stage. It could be the fact that my SS1 math students aren't in yet and I'm just doing alot of random subbing to take up my time between the computer classes I teach.......I dunno.

I've been onsite for a consecutive 3 weeks now. I'm not even going to include the morning bank run last weekend to Port Loko b/c I literally just went there and came back. Don't get me wrong, I love it here in Lunsar and there's so much to still discover but, I think I'm just having a case of cabin fever.

I am planning on doing a weekender to Freetown to do some unwinding at Peace Corps HQ. I think some American chop, American movies, electricity and wi-fi internet along with a change of scenery will give me the fix I need.

No biggie, I just realized that I hit this plateau when me and Michael were drinking poyo (palm wine) on his porch by candlelight. I mean, we had a great time, we were mixing low grade coconut spirits stuff with our poyo, doing crazy talk about everything and nothing while gazing up at the stars and chamming on moringa leaf. Sounds great right? Well ya, it was! We were celebrating his return to site after his several battles with miscellaneous medical stuffs. The PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Office) is a revolving door to the 100+ volunteers in all of Salone dealing with every kind of infection known to man. You can even reference my "PC Infection Medley" blog entry back in July. And it keeps going on like this for the rest of our service. Luckily for me, knock on wood, I haven't had anything major that required medical attention. Aside from my legs looking mangled from the constant biting from mosquitos and black flies, oh and the bed bugs (chinch dem) that attacked my legs in Panlap when I slept on the ground, I'm actually doing great, lol.

There's no real reason for me to go to Freetown PC HQ aside from just an unwinding break away from Africa. Sometimes you just need it and I think that this is one of those times.