When it rains…

Bad week =

1 person NGO (loss of 3 people for various reasons, including my counterpart)

No work (a disturbing trend)

Hospitalized for vomiting too much (for my own good)

Unable to organize my high schools 5^th year reunion

A week like this was only a matter of time in the making. I've found that with lately things either go either really good, or really bad. Sometimes I feel like I am on top of the world: I understand almost everything said to me, there is lots of work, I feel appreciated, and eat monti for dinner. Other times I feel like garbage: I fail to understand anything (or its in Kazakh, which I wasn't trained in), I sit and do nothing at work (or worse, copies), and the banya isn't hot. Usually I swing between the two feelings many times in the day. Not that I believe in karma or anything, I just believe that good and bad events have a tendency to cancel themselves out in the end.

With that said, I estimate that it will take about a month's worth of good events to balance out this last week's misfortunes.

The worst part was the hospital. How I ended up there isn't an exciting story. My body rejected something and I lost so much fluid through vomiting I had to go in. The vomiting led to a totally weird adventure; one that was totally different than what I expected and one that I don't particularly care to repeat.

What surprised me was that I already knew about ½ of the hospital staff! It made me comfortable to know that the nurses and doctors were also the people I met on the street during Naruyz, whom I chatted with in cafés during New Years, and in the bazaar every Sunday. I taught their children when I *had* English Clubs, and played soccer with them on Wednesday nights when its not raining or too hot. They knew me, and I knew them, and that made a world of difference because I knew that they knew what they were doing. They calmed me down when I freaked out by asking if I was still playing the sax, or if I knew that a doctor's son was attending school in Astana in the fall, or some other little thing about the town.

While the food wasn't bad, the worst part of the hospital was being alone at night. There is something about lying alone at 3am in a hospital in a foreign country with an IV in your arm wondering if you will be ok and I found myself panicking on several occasions. In reality I had nothing to fear. That night, the worst enemy was myself. However, the dawn came, the familiar doctors and nurses returned in their professional glory and I was released later on that day with a clean bill of health.