It's like playing a game of Oregon Trail...

Remember Oregon Trail? The old Apple IIE game, where you got to be a pioneer on the Oregon Trail? Hunting for your food, fording the Mississippi with your oxen? The funniest part of the game was how along the way (it never failed) you would inevitably lose some of your traveling party to diseases we had never even heard of, or thought were only back in the 1800s... like Cholera, the Plague, Dysentary, and other countless odd diseases. We'd laugh and laugh, "Oh Jennifer, you got Dystentary!! Haha!" Little did I know that one day I would be living this game.



I've decided living in Mongolia is like playing a game of Oregon Trail. We still have diseases like Cholera, Bacillary and Amoebic Dystentary, Giardia, Tuberculosis, and the Bubonic Plague here-- we have to "hunt" for our food in delgors (try making dinner out of Russian cookies, onions, and white rice!) and traveling to UB, it wouldn't suprise me if we had to ford the Xaraa River in our mikr bus.

For the last two weeks, I've been out of commission-- got a really bad bout of food poisoning that turned into a bacterial infection bordering on Dysentary. I never thought in my lifetime I would ever see these diseases, but unfortunately, in Mongolia, I have. I know multiple PCVs that have had Giardia MORE than one time, people that have had Dystentary and Cholera. It's literally like playing a game of Oregon Trail here, where you slowly lose members of your travel party to odd diseases. Fortunately, I'm not one of them! I'm on some good antbiotics now, and it seems to be on it's way out. Slowly, but surely. It's always an adventure here.