Monster Eye

Life in Namibia has been sort of a struggle these past few days. We are all just trying to make it to Thursday which is site placement announcement day!!! It is also our first LPI (a.k.a. language test… not actually sure what it stands for but Peace Corps sure loves their acronyms!) We are all desperate to know where we will be living for the next two years!

Yesterday was rough… just before I went to bed I noticed that my right eye felt funny. Before noticing that my eye felt funny, I was just lying down on the bed studying and talking on the phone under my mosquito net. So I went into the bathroom to look at it and it was swollen! It looked like the tear duct was swollen and it was pushing everything towards the outside. I also had some minor raccoon eye going on. It looked almost like I got punched in the face… which of course did not happen. EMT Katie kicked in! It didn’t hurt to touch it. The swelling felt like it was fluid filled. I didn’t see anything in my eye. It wasn’t red or itchy and it didn’t have any discharge! So weird! So I flushed it out with the eye solution that come in our medical kit and slept with a cool rag on my eye. Every time I woke up in the night I looked at it to see if the swelling went down. When I finally got up for training, the swelling had gone down, but I still looked like a monster. I showed my host sisters at breakfast and they didn’t know what was wrong. So I went to training and as soon as I got there, I had the Training Manager (Sidna) call Kate the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer). By this time the swelling had gone down even more and I was looking semi-normal again. Kate was scheduled to come to training in the afternoon so she said that she would just have a look at it then and if I needed to, she would take me to the doctor in the afternoon.

By the time she got to training the swelling was almost gone, but I had some remnants of raccoon eye left. She noticed the swelling in my tear duct and raccoon right away. She took a good look at my eye, (actually both eyes) and couldn’t see anything wrong. So she gave me a different type of eye drop than I already had and told me that she would look at it again tomorrow.

As of now, the swelling is almost gone and the raccoon eye is pretty much all gone. So I guess her eye drops are working! YAY!!! I don’t like looking like a monster. Looking back on this whole thing, I realized that I should have taken a picture of my ugly eye! I would find so much humor in it now (and so would my fellow PCT’s)! Oh well, I’ll leave it up to your imagination as to how ugly I looked (and trust me… it was bad!).

As soon as I find out on Thursday where I will be living, I’ll post some more information!

I can update you on what I have learned to say in Rukwangali:

Ame mulizambeli goukanguki go PeaceCorps - I am a Peace Corps Health volunteer.


Ame kwa tunda koPennslyvania moAmerica – I am from Pennsylvania in America.


Ame ngani karugana koKavango – I am going to be working in Kavango.


Ame kukwafa nokupakera mbili vantu vana kuparuka nokambumburu – I support and care for people surviving with HIV.

That’s just a little taste