The Basketball Adventures Continue...

The weekend after my adventure to the beach I took nine middle school girls along with one other coach back to Maracaibo to play in a basketball tournament. It was a lot of fun and the girls played really hard even though it was unbearably HOT! We arrived on Thursday and headed straight to the school to play two games. In the first game one of the girls went down pretty hard on her ankle and so she and I were off to the clinic for x-rays and to test my Spanish skills. We arrived at the clinic and were immediately whisked in to the main emergency room to find out that we needed to head over to pediatric emergency since she was not yet fifteen. When we got there we were surrounded by crying sick babies. I went to the registration desk to check her in and thought I was so prepared with her passport and insurance policy number of the school, however, I soon found out it would not be so easy. The woman who was helping get her registered kept insisting that I give her the girl's school ID (we do not have school ideas but most Venezuelan Schools do) after about ten minutes of explaining over and over again that we do not have a school ID card the women finally accepted her passport. Then we hit the next problem she has a diplomatic passport so when you renew it they staple the new passport to the old one and they also issue you a new passport number. Of course the insurance was registered under the old number which was once again difficult to explain but I managed to get over that hurtle. After about forty minutes of back and forth we were checked in. They took the x-rays and we determined it was only a bad sprain. We got back to the hotel to find out the girls had lost both games. We got up the next morning and headed off to play the third game of the round robin. We lost that third game and the girls were a bit down but we were off to a water park to cool off from the awful heat. The next morning we headed for our final game. We were the fourth and last place team and we had to play the third place team from the round robin to see who would win third place. We WON with a score of 7 to 4!!!! The girls were so excited. After getting our medal we headed back to the hotel to shower and head to the airport. On the way to the airport I began to feel car sick and I thought that was a bit odd but I thought when we got to the airport the queesy feeling would go away. I checked us all in and immediately headed to the gross airport bathroom. I began throwing up...not much fun in a public place. We finally boarded the plane to head back to Caracas and my vomitting had not stopped. I got on the plane and continued to be sick the whole hour plane ride home. Unfortunately once you get back to Caracas it is still a forty minute ride back to the school and of course I continued to be sick. I continued to throw up until 2am!!!! Needless to say the trip back was quite long and miserable but the girls were really sweet and the other coach helped me so I was able to make it back and start getting better. I think that my stomach does not like Venezuela...At least I hadn't kissed any pigs lately!!!