Many of you will not have heard of the Dengue Fever, but it is a mosquito transmitted viral infection which can cause a range of symptoms typically including high fever, nausea, vomiting and muscle soreness. Well, shortly after my last blog post I was diagnosed with Dengue 🤨. It started with a rapid high fever and nausea. I felt really bad. My volunteer organization’s doctors sent a car to Fatuquero to pick me up and take me to Dili. On arrival at Dili I was not in great shape (vomiting) but was able to stabilize and persuaded the doctors I did not need to be admitted to the hospital and could stay in a hotel close by to recover. I was fooling myself, as that night I passed out in the hotel bathroom 😑. I was helped over to the hospital about 3am by our fine doctor and from there had a 4 day stay in the hospital to recover.
We are very lucky as volunteers with our USA organization. We get really good medical support. The hospital I stayed at was the Dili Medical center (DMC) which was a nice private hospital. I was thankful to be looked after. I even had our Country Director visit me with a cheeseburger and fries from one of the two Burger Kings we have in Dili (I was extremely grateful as the food was pretty bad at the hospital 😝).
So, I had about 9 days in Dili including recovery. It was a pretty quiet time for me as I did not feel like healthy enough to do much. I managed to find a couple of new restaurants (including pizza!) and a good coffee shop/bakery. Also snapped a nice mural outside of the hospital. Some photos of my time are below.
I may have mentioned, but I have signed up to run a half Marathon in Cambodia (Angkor Wat) on 3rd August. So, before dengue, I was making some reasonable progress with my running. One morning I went out to do laps up and down the main paved street in Fatuquero and my little host brother, Leddy, decided he would run for a bit with me too. In BARE FEET!. I cringe when I see the kids walking outside in bare feet. I would not last one step in bare feet 😁. Leddy ran REALLY well, I was super proud of him. I now have to try and get back into my training after my Dengue. Not easy as even one week after being back in Fatuquero I still don’t feel near 100%.
New Cycle Route
Last Thursday was a holiday here in Timor-Leste. In the afternoon I decided to explore a “mystery” road that was on the map between Gleno and Ailleu. On the map it actually starts in the middle of nowhere and continues west. I managed to find a back route from Fatuquero via one of the river beds (dry now during the dry season) and, with the help of Google Maps and GPS, found the road and rode it (mostly). It was a spectacular ride but a massive climb and terrible road. I rode 5 miles out and 5 miles back in 1.5hrs with an elevation gain of 1457ft in about 4 miles. It was indeed a brutal ride and I needed to push my bike up 2 or 3 sections. That being said, I was still also not feeling 100% :(. The views were stunning and I can’t wait to ride it again and hopefully ride more of the sections I was pushing. Some photos below. Also, the bike survived and continues to hang in there as I beat it VERY hard 😁. Final photo shows my host sister, Cidalia, cleaning my bike with minimal amount of water. I bought her some sweets from the kiosk for her efforts 👍.
Oxfam Visit
The Oxfam charity organization visited my disability Group FJDE this week to interview some of our members to get a “pulse” on the organization. It went extremely well and the team did fantastic. It was indeed a good day and the Oxfam Team were impressed. I went through and described some of the support which I give the FJDE organization. I made a summary poster (in English and Tetun) to describe my activities there and I show that below. We call our support “capacity building” as we are, effectively, trying to build the capacity of the organizations to function and support their members and the wider community:
I may have mentioned that I managed to get FJDE registered on Google maps! That was not a particularly easy task with physical addresses non-existent. The link is here (https://g.co/kgs/H8VWppK) and a screen shot of the google review is shown below. I gave FJDE a 5 star review 😁. I’m quite proud I achieved this small win for FJDE.
Also, in other news, we have a planned trip for the FJDE disability group to the one (and only) movie theatre in Timor-Leste!. The date is the 22nd July and it will be an English movie we watch (TBD movie). For all of the FJDE group it will likely be the only time they will ever be in a movie theater during their lifetime so it’s going to be quite the event 😁. I made a poster so we could pin up in the FJDE office.
Finally, today I had the pleasure of hosting fellow volunteers Annabelle and Shelby at a local restaurant and my home in Fatuquero. We just chilled and talked. Mana Berta made us Tea and snacks (even though the electricity was out, she boiled water on the fire 🔥). Some photos below of us. Until the next blog… Take care :).
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