I’ve finally ordered, from various places on the internet, all the gear I’ll need for our trip. Having accomplished this, I can finally allow myself to feel excited. Previously, I felt enormously unprepared, and the task of preparing seemed daunting, overwhelming, and stressful. I’m sure I’ll still feel unprepared right up until our arrival but I am no longer stressed. At least I know I have the essentials; rain boots, bug repellent, and proper shirts and pants.
While I am no longer stressed about preparation, today’s class introduced a new source of stress: botfly maggots. As I learned from a lovely presentation by my classmates, botflies deposit their eggs on mosquitoes, and when the mosquito bites a human, the botfly larvae detaches in the hole made by the mosquito. The botfly then develops inside the skin of the human and pokes a little hole in the skin through which it occasionally emerges to breathe. Botflies are tricky to remove because they have two hooks securing them to their host and these hooks burrow deeper into the skin when pulled. If a botfly dies or breaks off under the skin, it can cause dangerous infection. Most people just have to live with the maggot in their skin until falls off or leaves by itself. While I realize the odds of this happening to me are very small (actually I have no idea what the odds are of this happening) it still freaks me out. I simply do not think I could live with that. I would be in a constant state of panic; I would not be able to stop hyperventilating. In fact, I’d rather just be sedated until the bug emerged.
Aside from preparation and botfly maggots, and maybe accidently drinking dirty water, there is not much I’m nervous about (which is actually king of a lot of things). I’m excited to practice my Spanish and I’m glad for the opportunity to step outside my comfort zone. Mostly I’m looking forward to experiencing a different country not as a tourist. I’ve traveled internationally before but only with my family on vacation and once with a cultural emersion program in high school. The educational component of the cultural emersion program was kind of lost and it really just felt like glorified sight-seeing. I’m excited to see Nicaragua not as a tourist but as a student.
The Makengue Project 