got the runs?

So I know I’m a health volunteer and my job here is to teach people how to lead more healthy lives, but sometimes I’m surprised at what people here don’t know or what they think they know. Somehow I managed to get through 5 full months without getting sick and I was a little bit proud of myself considering how many other volunteers had gotten sick within the first few months. I attributed it to the fact that I thought I had a good immune system. The month of July proved that my immune system was not quite strong enough to combat all the germs in this county. After a trip to Asuncion, I came back to a sick house. Everyone had a cold, and when I say cold, I mean hacking up your lungs type of cough. Within about 48 hours I joined the bandwagon and started sniffing and coughing too.
It really shouldn’t be any surprise that when one person in the family gets sick, everyone in the family gets sick. Their standards of cleanliness are not always exactly what I would call up to par and their understanding of how germs pass from one person to another is frighteningly appalling. Part of it I’m sure has to do with how they wash their dishes, aka, using a sponge that looks about a year old to scrub the dishes, they sometimes use soap, and half the time with already dirty and cold water. Then they stack the wet dishes in the cupboard without drying them, leaving any germs that live in water free to thrive on the plate until the next use. While drinking terere and mate while you’re sick is supposed to be a no-no, that rule never really is applied, and you see people hacking away as they pass you the guampa, or cough on their hand and then adjust the bombilla (straw) with the same hand. I had a really hard time convincing them that I really didn’t want to share dishes/terere until I no longer had a cold because I didn’t want to get worse. They just thought I was crazy. But like I said, they don’t really understand the concept of passing germs. I was making a cake with my host sister and my 5 year old brother came up to look at the cake and started severely coughing with his face about 5 inches from the batter. I winced and then tried to push him back a little, telling him it was better to cough “over there” instead of on top of the cake. My sister raised her eyebrows and asked me what I was doing and even when I explained you aren’t supposed to cough on food you are sharing, she just kept looking at me funny.
So considering the lack of general education here on germs and bacteria, and the standards of cleanliness they have for their bathrooms/latrines, I shouldn’t have been surprised to get giardia during my stay in Paraguay (or at least I think it was giardia, I’m not really sure). I’m actually surprised it took me so long to actually get sick. If you feel so inclined, go look up giardia on the internet. I’ll just tell you that I had diarrhea, vomiting, and headache for three days. It was not fun. Surprisingly, while my host mom was not quite so worried about the vomiting and diarrhea, she started getting really concerned when I refused food. I went over 24 hours without eating anything and the next two days I ate very little. During that time I also used an absurd amount of pepto bismal tablets. Between cleaning out my system and taking that many anti-diarrheal pills, I stopped up my system for a good few days after that.
I spent the next few weeks blissfully “germ free.” This week I suffered a migraine that lasted for over 48 hours. My neighbor laughed at me when I told her I was taking anti-inflammatory and drinking a coke with caffeine to help get rid of the headache. And as I’m sitting here writing, my stomach is making some quite absurd noises. I should have believed them in training when they told me I couldn’t go two years without getting sick.