Crazy times

Today I had my first day of classes and it was pretty crazy. This whole place is pretty crazy, in fact! I didn't realize that it is a third-world country, although a very pretty one. There are only eight students in my class and we are pretty diverse. There is a Philipino nurse from New Jersey who is a mountain climber in her spare time; a burnt-out dentist from Texas with 2 or 3 different master's degrees, a physician's assistant from Conneticut who has 2 kids back home, an Indian business student from New York, 2 Peurto Rican girls, a Nigerian chiropractor from Texas, and me. 4 guys and 4 girls and we live in this little bungalow with a long verandah and flowers all around it. Through some strange twist of fate, I don't have a roommate, which isn't a huge loss because I can still whisper to the girl in the room next to me through the paper-thin walls. We have privacy, but it is certainly limited. We are drawing close together as a group. Since most of us are fairly athletic (I'm including myself in that ambitious label), we decided to get up at 6:00 tomorrow morning for calisthenics and jogging.
Classes today were long and exhausting but did help clear up some of the perpetual confusion. One of our professors is this cool doctor from Louisiana with an accent that sounds like it came from the movies. She has the thickest Texan drawl I've ever heard and I have to keep putting up my hand and asking her to restate things. Some of the people here call me 'Canada' or 'Canada girl', as if it's a proper name or a disease condition or something. It didn't help matters that I walked the 5 kilometers to the beach the other day without sunscreen and came back bright red from head to toe. Now they really think being Canadian is some kind of disease.

We paid our first visit to the anatomy lab today. Forget these sterile white labs you see in pictures with a neatly preserved cadavers. We walked into the lab and the first thing I noticed were the wooden coffins stacked by the door.
"Decomposing bodies." Our Dr. Rust explained. "We're going to bury them."
The floor was old linoleum and the smell of rotting bodies and formaldehye assaulted our nostrils. It was dark and cracked shades at the windows let a bit of light in the smudged windows. Underneath the dissecting tables were pails to collect blood and other fluids, and I could see it pooling at the corners of the tables and on the floor. There were flies everywhere and when I gestured towards a wrapped body at the far end of the room, Dr. Rust said,
"Oh, don't go near him. The rats have got to him. They only come out at night, though."
It was like something out of a creepy horror movie. The mountain-climber girl was doubled over in the corner with her face wrapped in her skirt so she could breathe.
I approached our assigned cadaver with interest. She was completely wrapped in plastic- we're not going to start dissecting her until tomorrow- but her name is Nellie Mae and she is an old woman, that's all we know. After all I've studied and written about cadavers, I felt exhilerated at the though of finally getting to work with one. Dr. Rust encouraged us to think of it as her giving us a gift- Nellie Mae is giving us the opportunity to become doctors. Whoever she was, she is contributing to future lives being saved.
"Whatever you wear in the anatomy lab," Dr. Rust explained, "Don't consider ever wearing it again. You will never get the smell out, no matter what you wash it with."
We discussed different things to wear, as she doesn't even walk in with the same clothes on. She has anatomy lab clothes that stay in Antigua. The lab isn't air conditioned (explaining the flies, mold and incredible smell), and none of the local staff will go near it (they are firmly steeped in voodoo beliefs, Dr. Rust explained), so in order to get someone to lay new linoleum, they had to pay him off with extra rum.
Someone suggested that we could just completely cover ourselves with lab coats or plastic, but Dr. Rust reminded us of the extreme heat and lack of AC. I've thought of a good solution: don't wear any clothes. Tomorrow when we start working with Nellie Mae I'm just going to wear my bikini underneath a paper lab coat, and flip-flops on my feet. I might cover my hair with a plastic bag. The girl who was feeling nauseus is thinking about investing in underwater scuba equipment, so I guess I'm pretty lucky that the smell doesn't bother me that much. We'll see how it goes.
Aside from that, I realized that part of the craziness here is the crazy amount of information I'm going to have to learn in the next while. So far I can't believe how much fun I'm having, but I'm sure that will end soon.