Malaria Dreams and Review Sessions

So I've been starting to have some weird dreams.

Dream 1: Camilo finds out he has cancer. He decides to shoot himself in the head in front of me. As soon as he does it, he realizes that it's actually someone else who has cancer and not him, but it's too late. For some reason I leave him cause I have to go somewhere with a neighbor, who is American even though we are still in Guinea. We are at a gas station and I'm buying some sodas when I realize that I forgot to check on Cam and decide to call him. He picks up the phone and then I woke up. *This is the most violent and terrible of the dreams I've had.*

Dream 2: The people at my school tell me the school is closing down. I refuse to go to a new place and decide to ET (early terminate). I get home to Toulon, Illinois and there are all these chickens and hawks in my parent's house (who don't live in Toulon...) I decide to walk to town, which is Toulon in my dream, but doesn't really look like Toulon. In order to get to town I have to pass through the main PC compound. At this point I'm really upset that I left Guinea and am trying to figure out if I can get back there. Then a bus of all my volunteer friends pulls up - they had been evacuated and were all wearing riot gear. So strange.

Dream 3: Another dream about ETing. I decided to do it and then was filling out the final paperwork in the States and decided I didn't want to quit and I was trying to explain to them that I'd just made a mistake but they wouldn't listen to me and were just trying to get me to finish the papers.

I guess the main theme of these dreams is that someone made a gigantic mistake. The thing about mephlaquine dreams that makes them so bizarre is that they are super vivid. My friends last night were teasing me that I'm the only person who has dreams about being back in America and wakes up happy to be in Guinea.

Besides the dreams, my arms and legs fall asleep really easily and I think my hair is falling out more often - both are common side effects. It's tricky, cause the other drug we can use is a low dose antibiotic, and it's not good to be on that for 2 years either. The last drug, Malarone, isn't appropriate cause it's what we take if we get malaria, so we can't use it as a preventative. Mephlaquine is on a 10 day cycle, but they ask us to take it every week cause it's hard to remember to take something every 10 days. But I've started doing it anyway, since I check my calendar every day. We'll see if that makes a difference. If not I'll start splitting the pill in half and taking it every 5 days. After that I'm just gonna have to suck it up. Even though the dreams can be scary getting malaria is even scarier!

Now I teach Mon - Wed and have review sessions Thurs - Sat. This week I had 2 review sessions for one class, one for each of my 2 others and one session just for the girls. Whew. I'm gonna have to cut it down - I'm thinking 2 sessions for the three classes and another one for the girls. In January I might add a review for the kids who know the most - they want to learn so badly that a lot of them show up to multiple classes, even though they largely know the material and I do the exact same thing. It's just so hard to teach with the different ranges - I probably teach to the middle to high level and I know the slower kids are just getting left behind. But a lot of them probably didn't pass the test to get into class anyway and their parents paid off the government to say they did, so I don't care about them too much. A lot of them don't particularly want to learn but are forced to be in school cause of their parents.

My students got a major talking-to after my walk-out last week and were angels at Thursday's review. Apparently another teacher had really complained about them as well, so now there are 4 of them a day who are responsible for writing down the names of the talkers and turning it into the principal's office. I have a feeling it's going to be much easier to teach, at least these next couple weeks!

On Friday I'm headed to Boke for a week of fun and Thanksgiving. There are rumors that a turkey might be there as well. Yum!