Last week,I flew to Bangladesh & spent 7 days up country in a remote rural location.4 days after arrival I started feeling dreadful..fever,poisonous headache,stiff neck & aches & pains.No doctor available.No medical books available.One mobile telephone which was working erratically.No 911 service or ambulance.Heavy monsoon rains with flooding & associated power cuts.

Sounds like a dress rehersal for Y2k if its an 8 + ?

You bet !

Almost the worse thing was the fear.

What dreadful bug had struck?

Would I die before help arrived?

How could I get myself better?

Could I get myself back home ?

The fact that six days later,I'm sitting here in the UK writing this tells you that I'm still in the land of living & it was entirely due to the Timebomb Forums.

For in my suitcase,I packed some rehydration tablets & by sheer good luck had shopped in Dhaka on arrival for my Y2K antibiotics & aspirin.

A daily dose of 1500mg amoxillin + aspirin,bottled water & enough moments of lucidity to keep winding the alarm clock on a 6 hour ringing cycle for taking medication got me just mobile enough after three days to reach the airport & wobble onto the plane.

So many thanks,everyone, for all that medical information.You saved my life!

Lessons learnt ? Be prepared not just with medicines but also reference books.It was just luck that I was struck down by some kind of Asian chest infection & the antibiotics worked.

-- Chris (griffen@globalnet.co.uk), August 20, 1999

Answers

I guess we have to live like GIs and always be prepared--without being neurotic.

Glad you made, it, Chris.

I was just reading a wonderful article about Bengladesh, by the way, about a bank that makes small loans of under $100 to people who have their own businesses. The newest big (little) business there-- although it costs $400--to be paid back in three years--is to be a phone woman, a woman with a cell phone, which might be the only phone in the entire village. Because the country is so poor, many of the men work overseas and this gives them a way to call home. Solar is getting to be very important there because it provides lighting that extends productivity and study hours.

Sadly, or wonderfully, depending on how things go, high tech is the wave of the future there. The hope is that they will be able to input data in English, as a business venture, since many speak the language. Internet communications will be very imporant there. If the Internet survives.

-- Mara Wayne (MaraWayne@aol.com), August 20, 1999.

Dear Mara,

The Aid Agencies say there are Third World Countries & then there is Bangladesh.Dhaka is the most polluted city in the World.The "air" is blue from exhaust fumes & its very difficult to breathe.Rickshaw boys die early.People squat by the road side sorting out disgusting piles of decaying rubbish, others pound up new bricks to make rubble.(There is no stone ..just deltaic mud). The countryside is very beautiful but agricultural technology medieval. Things are very,very cheap out there so those loans are quite substantial.

I suspect one of the reasons they are being given to women is that any "single"woman without a family guardian is treated as the lowest form of life.However an ability to earn confers status.I went out as a consultant to an abandoned woman's vocational training scheme so I could rabbit on & this is not the place!

Feeling better by the day !!

-- Chris (griffen@globalnet.co.uk), August 21, 1999.

Chris, what kind of rehydration tablets?

-- Sylvia (bluebirdms@aol.com), August 21, 1999.