October 26th and 27th

So there's been an outbreak of fever here at Bethania. Many of the children had to go to the hospital to get free government distributed medicines today. We, along with some staff and many children have fevers and colds. Everyone is still in good spirits though, and there is much joking and prayer and vitamin taking. We're drinking our tea, have been resting for the past two days and taking cold medicine, as well as doing a lot of medicine sharing.
There's been an outbreak of "pig fever" (swine flu) in the nearest big city, but it has not come to Kannivadi. Muthumari said one of her classmate's brother had died from it. But we've been assured that our fever is not dangerous. It was high yesterday, but today we've been feeling much better. We've been told that we're actually just sick because sometimes people get allergic reactions to the sugar cane we ate on Sunday... Which still doesn't explain why all the other kids are sick too! Divya also told us that people with white skin have less hemoglobin, so get sick more easily. Not sure how much scientific basis there is for that, but our immune systems are definitely still getting accustomed to life here!
Aside from resting a lot, we've been up to our normal everyday chores here- filling and carrying up our water buckets, doing laundry, sweeping... Been too tired for any field work! Tuesday night we did English with the 8th and 9th grade girls. We played the antonym and synonym word matching games. They found it very difficult and didn't know what a lot of the vocabulary meant. Its sad to see how these older girls struggle with this game, while the third graders and Chandra's school found it too simple. As always, it was fun to sit, talk, and make jokes with the older girls for much of the time too :)