#58 - Derek Lowstuter

When we were in training, while we were living with a host family, I got severely ill.

I had dysentery.

I had amoebic and bacterial dysentery.

When I arrived in Ethiopia, I weighed around 175, 180 pounds.

By the time training was done, I weighed just over 120.

I was already fairly thin.

I'm kind of a lanky guy.

And so I lost any little fat that I had left on my body and quite a lot of muscle.

It was tough.

You know, I had to build that back up again over really the two years.

One dry season, the dry season right after I was ill, the water went out in our neighborhood.

We had run out of all the water that we had stored up.

So we had big plastic barrels and we had buckets and really any container that we could put a lid on and even some that we couldn't, we would just fill up with as much water as we could when the water was on.

And then it would shut off and then we wouldn't know when it would come back on again.

After two weeks, my neighbor and I, we had to go out and search for water.

And we heard that this one neighborhood a ways down the road had water on.

And so we went door to door, uh, asking for water.

So we stopped at this one house and we asked this person, uh, if we could use his water, he went and checked and it was on.

So we went back and when he filled up our five gallon, uh, Jerry cans of water and, uh, recovering from dysentery, you know, probably at the time I weighed 140 pounds or something like that.

And you know, these jugs, you know, full of water, they're like 50 pounds each.

And tiny handles on them.

And I just couldn't lift it.

I couldn't do it, let alone put it on my head.

We have these elementary school girls walking around with, you know, five gallon jugs of water on their head.

And I couldn't even, you know, lift it up to my shoulder.