I had to giggle at one of our blog comments yesterday. Kristi said, “when you guys do stress you do it big!” Oh hon, you don’t know the half of it. Let me tell you a story about how our whirlwind of a life started. Nearly 9 years ago…

Dan and I met in an intensive summer language institute when we were both in college (well, I was in grad school, but that doesn’t matter). The “institute” was basically a year-long Spanish course taught in 10 weeks. It was 8 hours of coursework with an expected 4 hours of studying each night. Dan and I met on the first day and became instant study partners. We spent at least 12 hours a day together and we got along pretty well. It didn’t take long to figure out that maybe we had something there!

Six months later we were traveling in Guatemala (technically I was on a research grant, but we were traveling to a more remote area for some R&R about 2 weeks into the trip). After a 6-hour bus ride, they dumped us into a crowded market, where I was almost immediately pick-pocketed. (I didn’t care about the $100 in cash as much as the fact that my credit cards and passport was stolen – ugh!) After frantic phone calls to the US embassy (a gnarly 8-hour bus ride away) and to my second mom in the US (to get a list of all my credit card and bank account numbers), and after much haggling with the local authorities in our broken Spanish, we finally got the police report that I needed to have my passport reissued. But it was getting dark and we had to settle in for the night.

We knew we were in a town with a dysentery alert, so we carefully chose a “safe house” restaurant according to our guidebook (which we later heard other travelers refer to as the Lying Planet) and had a simple meal. A few hours later, in a dingy low-end hotel, we realized that we BOTH most likely had dysentery. We prayed that it was food poisoning, but instead of getting better, it only got worse. (If you’ve ever had food poisoning, dysentery is MUCH worse and lasts MUCH longer.) We only had access to one bathroom. Thank God our timing was perfect…it was a most elaborate ballet that we danced (crawled) in turn. To our horror, we soon discovered that the hotel only had running water about 1-2 hours per day (which seemed to be different hours each day).

We couldn’t leave the hotel room for about three days. No one checked on us, and we had virtually no supplies. No food (not that we could stomach it). No clean water. No electrolytes. Not a good thing when you lose that much fluid. I truly think the only thing that kept us alive was the fact that one of the first nights we were affected, I managed to crawl (literally) down the stairs to the lobby, but couldn’t find anyone. There was one gallon-jug of safe drinking water, about 1/2 full. I grabbed it off the counter, and crawled back upstairs. We rationed for the next two days.

By the second day, we had sort of developed a system. We managed to get the mattresses on the floor to shorten the crawl to dysentery mecca. (By then, my germophobic self really didn’t care how nasty or dirty the floor was…I was spending way too much time on it and the germs inside me were definitely able to kick the butts of any germs outside me.) When things got really bad, we did a little venturing on hands and knees. We figured out that we could “break in” to the empty room across the way. The clean bathroom was a delight. Later we found a “public” bathroom at the end of the hall, also clean. Hallelujah.

Dan tells me it was that moment in the public bathroom when he was holding back my hair that he knew we would always be together. Romantic, no?

Lately we’ve been reading these horror stories about entire families getting giardia in Ethiopia. Well, if we do end up taking our Ethiopian adventure, it might very well be right around our 10th anniversary of Guatemala. What a great anniversary gift. All I say, is…bring it on, baby, bring it on.

[Afterword] We did survive. (Dan got strong enough on the third day to leave the hotel and scout out drinking water and crackers.) But “things” have never been quite the same. Worse, I have a reminder of those three days each and every time I travel. You see, the first day I could walk upright like a human being after the dysentery incident, we had to bust buns to get a new passport. Step one: photography. This was particularly discouraging because my old passport photo was a stylized black-and-white number that I had taken by a professional. No slap-and-stick Walgreens photo for me. Uh-uh. They don’t allow black-and-white anymore but, at the time, it was tres cool. I looked downright hot in my passport photo.

But now I have this awful passport photo of me, sans makeup, squinty-eyed and green, with a surprising and stupid grin on my face (although I was quite trim). Now, when I have to show my passport, I think of the Erma Bombeck book When you look like your passport photo, it’s time to go home. I always hope that someone will say, “hey, that’s not you.” But, alas, they don’t. (I had hoped that when I got married, I’d get a new passport, but nooooo, they just “updated” my name on page 48.)

That stupid passport doesn’t expire for almost another two years. I can’t wait to take a new photo. Let’s just hope it doesn’t end up like my driver’s license.