The horror. The horror.

I could see it all in front of me. A giant booster juice, a big bowl of steaming hot beef noodle soup, an icy cold pineapple drink and a thick perfectly grilled grade AAA Alberta beef steak. I was about to take a bite, i could feel myself drooling.

but wait.

that wasn't me drooling.

Something was licking my face. something was drooling on me.

in a flash, the food vanished to that mystical place where all dreams go when one is rudely awakened.

I opened my eyes to find Lela (one of the annoying animal shelter dogs) sitting on my pillow and licking my mouth with her disgusting doggy tongue. I screamed and sat up and shooed her out of the room, thoroughly disgusted.

the air was hot and humid and the power was out again so I didn't even have the luxury of hte electric fan churning the soupy air into something breathable. I got up and went out the wooden blue doors to the smelly toilets. i flipped open the lid and glanced warily into the greenish water depths. I was expecting, like usual, to be faced with the sight of someone elses feces floating in the murky water. the toilets here don't flush anything solid so whenever someone defecates, you have to wait for it to ferment and dissolved before it flushes away (assuming the flusher is working. it isn't 80% of the time).

i looked down in the water and what i saw was even worse than what i was expecting. you might be asking yourself at this moment: what could possibly be worse than the sight of fermenting poop?

how about the sight of a giant, bloated, drowned rat floating with fermenting poop in the toilet?

my stomach lurched, i closed the lid again and got outside to try to breathe in some non-existent fresh air. the air was too thick and warm to be of much good. i realised i'd have to skip the toilets for the day.

luckily, i was so dehydrated i did'nt have to go too badly anyways.

The drowned rat stayed in our toilet all week long until Sarah got so sick of it that she fished it out with our "dog" stick. it's a long wooden stick we use to control the dogs that live int he dorms with us (dogs like Lela who insists on jumpingo n your bed at night and licking your mouth and scratching ticks all over the place). Otherwise, the dogs are so spoiled and disobedient that they don't listen to anything you say. Hold up the stick, however, and they suddenly seem to understand you perfectly clear.(for the record, we don't hit hte dogs, we just threaten to).

Having used our precious dog stick to fish out hte dead rat (the dead rat which then sat out on our balcony in a garbage can for the rest of the week, rotting and being infested by maggots), we lost control of the dogs and the next night, lela got her revenge on me by sh*tting on my sheets and pillow. I'd call her a raunchy little b*tch, but that's just redundant and obvious.everyone at the shelter seems to love her though and they feed her better than any of us are eating.

So as you can tell, life here has been losing its charm. We have only a few more days before we move onto Calcutta and start volunteering with a different organization there.

I'm covered in bed bug amd mosquito bites. I have welts all up and down my arms and legs from my toes to my thighs and from my fingers to my shoulders. The bites are all so swollen and rock hard that they are white and dimpled and oozing. My arms looks like they're twice their normal diameter and are all deformed-looking cus of all the strange bumps and swellings. i've been so itchy that i thought i was going to go insane. I sat outside while they were feeding the dogs their afternoon meal of lentils and rice and scratched myself with the most flea and mange-ridden of them. i have to cover up my arms and legs all the time now because if I don't, people get so disgusted and start whispering and pointing and shaking their heads at me. That's how bad it is.

Meanwhile, we've learned to deal with most of hte creepy men. As luck would have it, the only hotel listed in the Lonely Planet guide for this city is located right in the middle of the red light district. Hence we were followed and harassed by such creepy men everywhere we went last time. We tried to get into a different hotel this time but all the hotels in town are full because, believe it or not, this is the most popular domestic tourist spot in India. I made the comment last night to the other girls that "if this is their Banff, God help us." It was meant to be funny but as soon as I said it, i realised the truth in the comment. None of us laughed in the end.

As for the insects, they've been getting bigger and nastier. Aside from the pesky bed bugs, I've spent most days battling cockoraches, spiders as big as my hand and some weird beetle or the other. The geckos help in my battle but even the geckos can't eat a cockroach the size of a small dog. Whilst on the squatter toiilets, I use one hand to support myself so i don't fall over and the other hand to brush off all the cockroaches crawling on my feet and up my legs. when i write in the vet files at the shelter, I don't even flinch when a giant spider leaps of the files as i open them now.

I'm making it sound really horrible here, which it is, but it's not all bad. Working with the animals is rewarding and aside from almost getting my hair ripped out by this crazy monkey the other day (and i was giving it a cookie bcause that's what i was instructed to do, damned monkeys) i've been having a good time. the head vet here even told me he'd let me do a surgery tomorrow. yay! I've also discovered my favorite past-time here which is plucking ticks off dogs. it's like popping bubble wrap. there's something so satisfying when you pluck 20 ticks off a puppy and watch them slowly drown in the pesticide solution. unfortunately, the ticks are taking their revenge and every night, when we shower, we have to wash ourselves carefully and look for ticks in all our cracks and crevices. they especially love the armpits and other dark places.

Am I going insane?

Perhaps I am. But can you blame me?

I've been trying to ignore all the phsycial hardships and instead, look to the amazing cultura experiences i've had here to justify it all. The other day, sarah and I got to go to the country side and visit several farmers in surrounding villages and discuss cattle with them. At every farm we visited, we got fresh mango juice (which they insist on mizing with a teaspoon of salt here. makes it undrinkable but you don't want to be rude so you just grin, chug it and try not to gag at the salt taste), fresh jackfruit (which kicks ass on the jackfruit in canada), fresh indian sweets (i try to like them. I try, but it's a losing battle. they taste like pure flour and sugar and oil to me which is the last thing you want to eat when you are dehydrated), and water buffalo milk.

Thats right.

Water buffalo milk.

They gave it to me at the first farm int he form of a yogurt. i walked past several pathetic looking water buffalo on my way into the farm house. They're such strange animals what with their black blue elephant-like skin and strange thick sparse hairs. Their milk tastes like goats milk but . . . chunkier.

The next farm we went to gave me a full glass of water buffalo "buttermilk" diluted with water and with a fresh lime squeezed into it. I looked at Sarah, panic-ridden and she put her glass down. I was going to do the same but before i could, the farmer returned and looked at me expectantly. "you drink yes? it's buffalo milk! good!"

I looked at the chunks of fat floating in the weird water milk, looked at sarah with imploring eyes one more time, held my breath and chugged the stuff. As I chugged it, rungs formed around the glass where bits of fat stuck to the sides of the cup.

The ride home was fun and i got horrible stomach cramps but I survived. I looked out the window the whole time so i wouldn't get sick and we passed by field after field of palm trees, grass huts, girl carrying water jugs on their heads and naked children peeing by the roadside. At one point, a guy wearing nothing but a loin cloth rode by on a rusty bike, hauling a big cart of sugar cane. cattle and water buffalo roamed around like they owned the place and at one point, i saw a cow rummaging through the dumpster. instead of raccoons, they have cows in their garbage here.

We got back into the city very late at night and the shelter manager insisted on taking us to a road-side diner for a meal. i was still full of water buffalo milk and mango and goodness knows what and i wasn't hungry at all. he ordered a big meal for us anyhow and before we ate, we were supposed to go to the big wash tub outside the diner where a group of men were gathered, washing themselves. one guy stripped down to his loin cloth and was practically showering naked int he street.

Sarah and I shook our heads when the shelter manager told us to wash there and instead opted for a good dollop of purell on our hands. The food came, but before it did, the waiter spread out a giant banana leaf in front of each of us which we rinsed with water and were to use as placemats. When the food arrived, i was surprised at how much pepper and black bean was in my curry.

I didn't notice until i dug my hand in for a bite that the pepper and bleack beans were wriggling.

They weren't spices. They were bugs.

It's unnerving when your food threatens to crawl off the table towards the flourescent lights across the street. As I would pluck out one bug, another fly would land in my food and in the end, I decided it was futile and since i have been eating mostly vegetarian here, the bugs would be good protien.

well, that's enough whining for one blog. thanks to everyone who responded last time. Joanne, if you want more details on the kitten killing, read my e-mail. since i last e-mailed you, another two kittens have died. we did a post mortem on one of them and found nothing conclusive. Sarah, the cat-lover of our group, says that the dying kitten thing is starting to get old. I have to agree.

Also, i got cornered in a bathroom the other day with a cockroach that was bigger than jaws. i swear.
alright, so not that big, but still. if that cockorach was made of meat, it could happily feed a small child for a year.

and to top it all off, i get stared at everywhere here. the other girls get stared at too, but it's like i'm an added freak show because i'm this chinese girl hanging with a bunch of westerners. They call me "Japaney" at the shelter because they all think i'm from Japan, not Canada, no matter how many times i tell them. What gives? It's the only oriental country they know and some of the locals are seriously racist here. I won't even repeat what I've heard coming out of their mouths here about Jews and "negros". They make comments about me and my oriental "country men" and our japanese customs. i shrug and laugh because, what else can you do?

I can't wait to get to the next place. We're promised more wild life work, but it's another animal shleter so likely, we'll be doing spays and whatnot again. I finally got to eat fresh fruit and vegetables and am feeling much more human. i'm not sure if it's just getting cooler here or if w'ere finally getting used t the heat, but it's not as hot anymore. At least I'm not sweating rivers like i used to.

I don't know what else to say. I have a lot more to say but i can't possibly even express it.

enjoy your summers everyone. pray for me down here. I'm having a better time than i let on, but it's hard not to focus on the negative when i have a chance to sit and think about it all and vent. My arms and knees are starting to itch again. argh.

Take care everyone. I miss you all! Lynda, have a great time in Ghana. Hope you're faring better there than i am here!

GAbe, e-mail me more often or you'll be sorry. joanne, likewise.

FEroza, you're probably enjoying married life too much to read my blog, but let me say CONGRATULATIONS! and all the best!!!!!

bye everyone! back into hell I go. sorry for another downer post. I'll try to type something cheery next time. did I already mention i miss you all?