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Where
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You're sick Malcolm! Sick!8th January 2006 The person with such an infectious disease must wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of his face and cry out, "Unclean! Unclean!" Leviticus 13:45 Playing Pusoy Of course, many Filipinos completely ignore this law and play it anytime they want. Captain Narsing related a story to me about this. Men often come up to him and ask "Please sir, may I have some medicine for my sick child? I have no money to pay for it." Captain Narsing invariably tells them to go away as he has seen them gambling away their wages. A hard lesson methinks. The only legal form of gambling in The Philippines is cock fighting. It is such a cultural tradition in The Philippines that if the government tried to ban betting on it, then I'm sure there would be some sort of national riot. I digress. Trying to play Pusoy "Err guys," I said, "This is gonna have to be my last hand." They were a little confused but said okay. Before I could finish the hand though I started to feel really bad. I excused myself from the table and quickly made my way to a convenient tree. Now the average life of a tree is a fairly humiliating one. Children climb on you, men pluck your fruit and dogs urinate on you. I decided to really humiliate the tree by throwing up on it. That's right. I hurled. I blew chunks. I did the technicolor yawn. As is invariably the case when you evacuate the contents of your stomach, I felt a lot better afterwards. I wasn't going to let this slight dent in my otherwise rugged macho man exterior ruin a good game of cards. Which was just as well, because on the next hand I got a Triple Pusoy! Excellent! The gut-gremlins soon returned though and I once again took the tree down a social notch or two. Eden thought it would help if she did this acupuncture type thing on me. She took the webbings between my thumbs and forefingers and pressed hard with her own thumbs and forefingers. It was a little bit painful. She also did something similar with my ears. She claimed that my negative energy would flow into her, and her positive energy would flow into me. Very self-sacrificial I thought. She also said that this technique was one of those things that Filipinos did that westerners don't really believe in. From my own point of view, this is only half true. I don't buy into this whole negative/positive energy thing, but I do believe that the body has certain sweet spots that can alleviate pain. Heck, some people have had surgery with only acupuncture as an anesthetic. The people I were playing with wanted to call the game off and take me home. "No, no," I protested, "Don't stop the game on account of me". We played three more hands and then headed home. Not Playing Pusoy The concern from the locals was quite nice. They were generally concerned about my well-being. Reza and Eden brought me stuff like warm water and fruit. Nothing stayed down though. They kept on asking me, "Malcolm, Malcolm. Do you want to go to hospital?" Hospital? For a stomach bug? Must be a Filipino thing I thought and kept refusing. As Eden was leaving for the night she said, "Malcolm. Go to hospital." "No," I reiterated. The evening was tortuous. Up and down all night, not getting any good sleep. In the morning, they finally to convince me that I should at least have some medicine. They returned with some prescription medicine that I dutifully consumed. How they to managed to get prescription for me, without me being there, is still a mystery. They also brought some Gatorade to help re-hydrate me. It was wonderful stuff and I thoroughly recommend to anyway who suffers a similar fate to mine. Saturday was a write off. I slept the whole day It was a bit of a shame really, because I wanted to spend the weekend on Guimaras with the new volunteers. * And I just don't like the "Petit" toilet that they have here. Sometimes I need a man-size toilet for a man-size bowel movement Questions? Comments? Try contacting
me. (c)
2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
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