Acclimatizing

Sunday last week (9th), while on a trip to Nanga Pinoh, I developed a fever.  By the time we returned about 6pm, my temperature was 39.5degC.  I had the added discomfort of VERY sore, somewhat swollen feet from too much wandering barefoot on hard surfaces (mostly tiles, some concrete).  The fever was gone by the next morning, but I was still unwell, I could hardly walk, and my appetite had disappeared completely.

While in Nanga Pinoh, I had bought stationery so that I could work on my Indonesian language skills.  By Wednesday I was able to get my head around that, so I borrowed Emily Johnston's notebook (the Johnston family are from Australia and will be here until mid-December), in which she had written her own bi-lingual dictionary.  I finished copying that last night.

By Wednesday afternoon, I had had enough of resting and was ready to get into some work, but Thursday was a public holiday.  I still find it odd that a Muslim country would have a public holiday for Ascension Day (the day Jesus returned to Heaven).  I tend to get my days muddled anyway (I thought that Wednesday was still Tuesday), but having a Thursday turn into a Sunday really screwed up my timetable!  We had a sleep-in and a 9am-11am church service just like a Sunday.  And then instead of cell group night we had another everybody-together service in the evening, with a visiting ministry team from Jakarta.  That was interesting to watch, because the preacher was from Beijing, China, so he spoke Chinese, and one of the men from Jakarta translated into Indonesian, which meant that the English speakers still missed out!  But it was entertaining to watch, and he had a series of pictures to show on the projector, which made it more interesting.

After all that inactivity, I was really keen to work on Friday.  Malcolm Taylor needed soil shifted from where the truck dumped it, down to the newly-terraced garden, so I shoveled soil into a wheelbarrow, trundled the barrow half way (15meters), where Malcolm (later Samuel, the doctor) had an empty barrow ready for me.  He took the full one, and I returned with the empty and started again.  I was enjoying the work and the teamwork and the sunshine (this time with sunscreen as well as hat), stopping for a drink every so often.  Nearly two hours later I began to run out of energy, so I stopped.  But by then I think I'd already done too much.  As I headed back to the TC, my head began to spin, my stomach added its own twists and turns, and I had to sit down under a tree quite suddenly, drinking water and waiting for my system to catch up.  That was about 9:30am.  I did some cleaning of tiles in the bakery during the afternoon, but that was pretty much my week's work, as far as physical labour went.  I spent a lot of Saturday sleeping.  Now I have people saying, 'give it time, give it time'.   After all, I do have over 7 months still to be useful here.  That's not to say that I'm not being useful now!  It's just the physical labour for me is patchy at best.

So, I would say that the hardest part about acclimatizing is making the mind realize that there is an adjustment being made.