by Food poisoning is very common in the mission. There are three main sources of food poisoning in the mission:
1. Eating bad street food. I never really dealt with this kind of food poisoning because I limited what kind of street food I would eat. For example, I avoided street food that had meat in it. Some missionaries eat meat from street vendors and can get sick.
2. Buying expired and poisoned products. This can happen and You are going to have food poisoning like every other month because the food is just bad, ex. bad fish, and botulism from bad cans of tomato paste. It isn’t a serious sickness. It usually lasts a couple hours to half a day.
3. Buying good products but they expire because of improper storage. This would happen a lot. We would buy good food but then the power in the apartment wouldn’t work 50% of the time so our frozen foods would go bad and would cause problems.
I ate this piece of fish on Saturday, my second day in the field. That night, I couldn’t sleep. So I got out of bed and just sat on the couch and read my French dictionary. I sat their all night and felt really sick. I called the mission president’s wife about the sickness and she said that I should just drink water. So I drank a liter of water and then barfed all of the dinner from last night into the toilet.
I felt better, I was just really tired from lack of sleep and because I hadn’t eaten anything.
The usual sequence of events is as such:
Usually the poisoned food that you eat tastes really bad but since you have no other options for food, you continue eating. About 10 minutes later your stomach starts feeling funny. About 20 minutes later you are lying on your back in pain and your stomach feels like it’s going to explode and you feel like you’re going to die.
After about 3 hours, if you drink enough water, you will throw everything up and you feel better. I had to go through this many times, after eating street shawarma, bad fish, bad tomato sauce, and other things.
The best option to not get food poisoning is when you know something is bad or that can taste that it’s bad, just stop eating and go and buy something. When I made tomato sauce once, the sauce was obviously tainted. It tasted terrible so no one ate it except for me. I was being lazy and just ate what was there, so since I didn’t stop eating, I was the only one in the apartment who got the sickness and I didn’t sleep that entire night. It was torture for my stomach.
The effects were not long term however. I remember being pained all night after eating that bad can of tomato sauce and the next day we went back to work as if nothing had happened besides that I lost a bit of sleep. It didn’t hurt you long-term.
My comp took this picture of me. This is me at like 10 am after getting food poisoning. You can see, I didn’t change my pants because I stayed up all night.
