Do I Have Zika?, And Other Questions (With Answers)

Hello, and welcome to a Thursday night/Friday morning edition of "Rhetorical Question and Actual Answer with Aubrey Stoddard." I'm your host, Aubrey Stoddard. Let's get started, shall we?

How well can I waste away an entire morning?

Very well! Something I excel at, actually.

Though I had complete faith in my ability, I decided to retest myself yesterday when I didn't have to get out of the house until 2:30 PM. I managed to lounge around, press snooze multiple times, drink copious amounts of coffee, and go on a (very, very short) run before skipping out of the house and making my way to an interview with a very inspiring high school student.

How difficult is it to put together an entire midterm presentation in less than two days?

Not as difficult as I imagined, actually! Especially when you're privy to especially talented and inspiring individuals like those that I met yesterday and today. This past winter, hundreds of high school students in the state of Sao Paulo (yes, Sao Paulo is a city and a state--like New York. Come on, keep up!!) participated in a giant protest against governmental reorganization of their schools. They staged months-long occupations of their school buildings, prohibiting officials from entering and maintaining 24-hour watch and protection of the area in order to show teachers, police, and the government their ideal school. They organized cleaning schedules, cooking schedules, sleeping schedules, activities and lessons taught by world-renowned professionals and experts.

But more on those students in just a moment. The presentation took a total of two hours after about eight hours of gathering evidence and conducting interviews.

Exactly how long can I sleep?

Twelve hours is the current record. Last night, I managed to sleep from 9:30 PM to 9:30 AM with only one phone check in those entire hours. There were, however, countless moments of half-dreaming, half-lucid moments in which I thought a civil war had begun outside my window due to some car backfires and motorcycle revvings. Did I wake up refreshed?

Instead, I turned to Sam, and immediately complained,

What can we learn from these protesting students?

Okay, in all honesty, it's a little difficult to make me feel really bad about myself. Maybe I'm only being this honest because it's 12:30 AM and I'm procrastinating on a midterm, but it's true--I'm pretty self-confident. Meeting these sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, though, made me feel like screaming--

These teens were wearing super edgy jewelry and smoking cigarettes, and like I've taken all the "Just Say No" classes, but they somehow made smoking look really, really cool, like--

And I was just like--

woah.

Okay, seriously though. These students had noticed an injustice in their educational systems, and they refused to remain passive. Instead, they gathered together in a unified movement and literally took over their schools. They disregarded the police, their principals, and mainstream society and instead took impassioned control of their own futures.

That's pretty f*cking sick.

I hope that if I see my own future jeopardized in such a way, I have the courage and fortitude and strength of self to voice my opinions and use whatever means necessary to defend my rights, like these awesome teens.

How do I always manage to turn into a caricature in my homestays?

Okay, this one doesn't really have a good answer, because I don't really know. Maybe it's my effusively joyous and excited personality, or maybe it's just my addiction to certain foods, but I literally become like this cartoon character in my homestays with super definable qualities.

I'm not sure if I'm explaining this well, but I'll try. In my Indian homestay, my homestay mom spoke basically no English. Sure, a few isolated words here and there, but for all intents and purposes, zilch.

So, when I got really sick and was throwing up, she began offering all sorts of foods (because obv that's what I love). "Rice? Grapes? Kurd?" She inquired.

No, no, and what no absolutely not.

So, she resorted to the dependable favorite. "Chocolate ice cream?"

I considered for a moment then, feeling my stomach ache in protest, responded "No thank you."

Her reaction:

That's when she knew I was really sick.

Also, when numerous family members came to visit my home stay mom the day that Sally and I were set to leave, she would rattle off in Gujarati for minutes and, when she finished talking, they would turn to me with a smile and comment, "She says you LOVE chocolate."

That's it. That's what she got from a month of inhabiting with me.

My current homestay knows a few more of my obsessions because the language gap isn't quite as large.

1) Coffee. After a few days of consistently begging for more coffee after their pot would run low--

My host mom started making about three times as much coffee as she usually does. Now, she's made a kind of song out of my addiction that she will sing to the baby as she brews my coffee. It's kind of like a humming "Aubrey loves cooooffee, coffee for Auuuubreyyy, la la la."

I wish I was kidding.

2) Food in general, but especially desserts. I already talked about my "pregnancy scare"--

just fat

but my host sis has continued to inquire about my quote "devastating hunger" (exact words) and told me that after eating an entire sleeve of chocolate cookies today, she thought of me. Trust me, I love her; I find it hilarious that she knows me so well after only three and a half weeks. But honestly, all this talk of my obsession with food only two days before spring break has got me like--

3) Distinctive clothing. This one is a lot less problematic than the first two, thank God. I am well-known on Harv's campus and within the IHP circle for my crop top and skirt/shorts combo--it's kind of my trademark--but now even my host fam knows! My host sis said she saw "colorful pants" in a store window and thought of me.

So, sometimes being a caricature isn't too terrible. Maybe it just means I know myself like really really well--so everybody else knows me pretty well, too!

And finally, the question you've been waiting for--

Do I have Zika?????

I mean.... potentially. Symptoms are fever (check), headache (yup), fatigue (twelve hours of sleep--so yes), and muscle ache (I mean yes, but it could be my short-lived flurry of exercise to shed the pounds before spring break). But Zika actually isn't too big a deal if you don't get pregnant within two years. So yes, I may have Zika, but it's not as scary as you think!!!

Well that's all for this edition of "Rhetorical Questions and Actual Answers With Aubrey Stoddard." I'm Aubrey Stoddard, and I'll see you next time--post-midterm presentation and potentially in Rio!!!

Tchau, dearies,
Aubs

Illness in India

(From February 12)

What is worse than being sick?

How about being sick in a foreign country? In which you can’t communicate with your host mother to tell her you’re throwing up? And, when your stomach hurts beyond belief, being offered Indian food to calm it down?

Yikes, right?

I’m just getting over my illness of stomach pain, fevers, aches, and chills, but it was not a pretty time, my friends. I could barely keep down crackers and grapes, and I couldn’t sleep more than twenty minutes without waking myself up from shivering or aching. It sucked.

More than the sickness itself, the homesickness bothered me most. Not having my mom to bring me a smoothie or rub my back or tell me that I was going to be okay brought me to tears. I felt so alone and isolated and helpless. It sucked.

I also couldn’t have gotten sick on a worse day. Yesterday, my entire class visited the regional commissioner who provides exit visas for those leaving India. We’d been told that he could be rather masochistic and pressingly interrogative, which is exactly the kind of person you want to deal with when you’re feeling nauseous and icky. Fortunately, I was allowed to rest in my faculty member’s home for a few hours before going to the office alone, after the rest of my classmates. I got my exit visa with little trouble, because once the officer heard I was nauseous, he got scared that I would throw up all over his office and signed off without asking any more questions.

When I woke up today, still feeling pretty sick, I was scared that I’d have to figure out how to find a doctor in freaking India and figure out insurance, etc. while dealing with a headache and stomach ache. LUCKILY, my childhood best friend’s grandparents are actually from India and are even visiting the country right now!! They called me to see how I was feeling and connected me with a family friend doctor who lives in Ahmedabad. She gave me advice on what to eat and what to do then spoke with my host mother in Gujarati so she knew what to give me. How serendipitous is that??!

Honestly, though, I’ve literally had the most boring two days, so there is like nothing to write about. I laid in bed all day today, reading books and writing papers. My roommate left for the weekend, so I am probably going to watch some Discovery Channel to satisfy my craving for the English language.

Oh, also, I haven’t had access to WiFi for two and a half days now, and I probably won’t have any for at least another two and a half days, so basically I feel like a frickin hermit, isolated from the rest of humanity. Keep me in your prayers.

Bye bye for now,

Aubrey