Thoughts

I'm doing my usual lazy Monday thing, watching French television and snacking and writing postcards and browsing the Internet, since I don't work until later in the afternoon. Monday's the only day I start so late. It's a rather nice way to ease into the week.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is. But I felt like writing a bit, so I am.

We found out last week that the radioactive cloud from Japan is supposedly over the West Indies now. There are no tools here to measure the radioactivity, so no one can really know how hazardous it is. I heard that in Guadeloupe, people were giving out potassium iodide tablets for the thyroid. Nothing like that has happened here. Everyone's kept very mum about the whole thing.

It's also supposed to be the dry season, but it rained all week last week, culminating in a twenty-four hour torrential downpour on Saturday. I think I've posted about it before, but I've never seen rain like this anywhere else in the world. It just pounds and pounds and pounds and never stops. And apparently, that means that all that dangerous stuff in the sky is pouring down onto us now, sans cesse. But there's absolutely nothing to be done. And it's impossible to know how bad it is, if we should limit our exposure to sand (which harbors radioactivity) -- a daunting task on a tropical island -- or if we should stop drinking the tap water, or even just stop going outside. That last one is kind of unavoidable. Then again, maybe everyone's making a big deal over nothing. Like I said, we'll never know.

And on Saturday, I woke up with a scratchy throat and feeling of general lethargy. I think I was probably just under the weather (I feel much better today), but my mind immediately jumped to dengue fever, of which there's an epidemic in Martinique, and which at least five other assistants I know have gotten. It's a disease contracted through mosquitoes, characterized by rash, bleeding, nausea, extremely high fever, and head and muscle aches. It can be life-threatening in some cases (one of the assistants got hemorrhagic dengue, the strain that can kill you if you're not careful), and there's no treatment or cure. You've just got to wait it out -- from what I've heard, it lasts about a week. One of my friends who got it in December told me that she literally thought she was going to die. It was that bad. She said you get really, really depressive in your thoughts. I can't even imagine. Many of the native Martiniquans I've talked to said they've had dengue several times. It's just another one of those unavoidable things that comes with living here. Sure, you can take measures to protect yourself -- anti-moustique, sleeping with a fan or a mosquito net -- but they certainly aren't foolproof. You can never be protected 100 percent of the time. It's simply infeasible and unrealistic to expect to cover every inch of your body with DEET 24 hours a day.

And while we're on the subject of things I can't control, last night, I saw the biggest spider I've ever seen in my room. My house has all kinds of spiders and grasshoppers and cockroaches and centipede-like things and cicada-like things and lightning bugs and other creatures I can't even describe. I've seen some pretty weird things fly in and out. Once, I even had a toad in my bathroom. I had a mouse for awhile over Christmas break, too. It made my skin crawl at first, but I've learned not to be surprised by anything anymore. The creepy-crawlies are yet another thing on this island I've just been forced to shrug my shoulders at and accept as part of living here. This is what they call character-building, I guess...?