This is what happens when Kim catches me playing video games when I should be studying the Bible.
No, lol, just kidding. I've been sick with a cold these past few days and in Vietnam there's this ancient folk remedy called "cao gio" (or scraping wind)the village folk like to use to treat a variety of illnesses.
The belief is, illnesses such as colds, and fevers are caused primarily by bad stuff in the wind. When the bad stuff gets inside of you, it gets trapped and has no way out which results in illness.
To remedy this, you get someone to take some of that green Eagle Brand Oil
and any piece of metal - i.e. a coin, spoon, a dogtag, in my case it was a U.S. quarter - and scrape the skin on your back along the ribs while applying the oil to create ample ventilation for the bad wind to come out. The more bad wind a person has, the more dark, red splotches will appear on their back. Conversely, if you have no bad wind at all, you won’t get any red splotches. I tried this on Kim's back and to my surprise, no red splotches appeared. Weird eh?
Anyway, we made sure we prayed and asked for Jesus' intervention before scraping wind just in case we were unwittingly meddling into some backwoods, Vietnamese voodoo. Everything turned out fine, but I didn't start to really feel better until we made a trip to the local pharmacy later that night and picked up some good old fashioned Sudafed. Go figure.
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