Lebaran

This is a picture of KJ and I during Lebaran at a friend's house.
Lebaran is best translated (I think) "holiday season." Imagine combining all the eating, visiting, charity donating, and hugging you do for Thanksgiving and Christmas and then throw in the parades and fireworks of July 4th. That's Lebaran, the time right after Ramadan (fasting month) ends. On day one, I visited 8 houses; day two, 5 houses; day three was just 1 house but it was a few hours away and the one visit consumed the whole day. At those 14 houses, I ate 11 full meals!
I woke up on day four feeling a little queasy, but we had plans so I got in the car anyway and went to pick up my friends. We drove to my friend Sara's house (also about 3 hours from where I live), and her mom had made lunch for us. Unfortunately by this point, I was not feeling well at all. She had four of my favorite local foods, and I could hardly look at them without feeling nauseous. No turning back at this point though. We were expected at a friend's house another five hours down the road, so I curled up in the back seat and slept most of the way.
By the time we got to the friend's, I was full-on SICK. While everyone else was eating and visiting, I was lying in a borrowed bed on a Spiderman bedspread wondering why on earth I'd left my house that morning, praying I'd make it back home the next day.
God also chose this time to teach me some patience, since He knows I'm not so great with that. Many people in this country believe in "masuk angin," which literally means "the wind comes in." Wind coming in can cause all kinds of ailments, and my friends immediately diagnosed me with masuk angin, although I tried to tell them it was probably food poisoning considering how many houses I'd eaten at in the preceding days. No, no. It was definitely masuk angin. The cure for this is to rub foul-smelling oil on certain parts of the body- the stomach, back, neck, and face- and to stick a kind of icy-hot tape to the sick person. At first, I refused these treatments since the smell of the oil is enough to make me throw up on a good day. As time went on, I became both more desperate and less able to argue, so that night I ended up with tape in a square around my naval and smelly oil rubbed into my back. (I got a short massage out of it, so it wasn't a total waste.) I did manage to convince my "doctor" that the oil couldn't go anywhere near my face.
The next morning, in an answer to prayer (and I'm pretty sure unrelated to the naval tape), I was well enough to get back in the car and ride the eight hours home without getting sick. After a brief remission, whatever I had came back, and I was sick for another few days- but thankfully back in town in a comfortable bed and with air conditioning!
Overall, Lebaran was great this year, and I really wouldn't take back any of the time spent in houses talking with friends and sharing their food, even if I did end up with masuk angin.