Plasmodium falciparum

 I’m trying to roll a big rock up the hill this week.. the rock is winning. After the initial adjusting to a new home, project, environment, food, and getting to know the people around you is done, the what if and oh no’s set in and a mosquito called reality smacks you down with a thing called malaria to heighten the insecurities. I lay in bed with racking muscle aches, violent, convulsive shaking.. freezing!.. and the fever rises and the bed is adrift, awash in heat and sweat and the stomach heaves and on it goes in cycles for days. I take the medicine and things become less dense yet my head swims in the drugs. I think I’m in India and it takes a great deal of self dialoguing to be fully convinced I am yet in Africa.

There is clarity though in this state, at how I can afford the medicine, that I have a bed, that I have clean water and clothing and options. This is the strain that kills the most people in Africa. This is the one that kills the babies, that robs them of their mothers and I hear every day of someone who has this malaria as if it were a common cold. I try not to complain too much because of those options I have that others are denied by geography, economics and politics. I put it in another perspective though, Western guilt for being sick.. that really accomplishes a lot!

I am back on my feet now and behind the curve with so much work to do. I am at the internet café daily helping to support Bosco with ideas he has to partner with students in Canada for matching kids here with similar interests and learning partners. The Toronto District School Board are hooking us up and soon kids here will be given the advantage of distance learning and the interchange will foster understanding of similar interests and hope  for futures in disparate cultures. It’s a great project and we are excited that it is taking wing.

Our non-violent voter education training is taking shape and should soon be finished and ready for delivery to our target audience – women and youth. Our fund-raising concert is getting some good buzz and we’re off on a corporate sponsor hunt to fund the various components. So, it is out of the bed and hit the ground running but I am trying to pace myself so I don’t relapse myself back to the ozone layer.

The rat is still an issue.. or should I say rats, I suspect from the activity that there is a colony, a community building into the space above. There is a housing shortage in Arua. I set the trap.. he eats around the snapper. He takes things from the hut and leaves er.. other things. Last night in the dark I stepped on the trap. Yup! That’ll kill him if he ever stumbles into it in the dark lol.

Some of my wash is missing. My hair never gets clean and shiny – the water is hard and gritty. I am bucket bathing. There is a shower but I cannot stand underneath the cold stream without holding my breath and shivering like a little girl. I have never been able to handle cold water. I prefer pouring warm water from basin than sanding off goose pimples in the drying process. I have no idea what the sound of silence is anymore, at all. Let’s see.. rat rustling, crack of dawn roosters, call to prayer, turkeys, neighbors dog, chickens, guinea fowl (and they can let off some mean riffs let me tell you!), voices and clamour from the kitchen, banging metal gate, compound dump truck start up, boda-bodas, crying baby.. and yelling – always yelling to get one another’s attention, "for gosh sake, it’s only a small compound" I think. I long for the green trails behind my home far up north, the quiet hush of footfall and hidden thoughts I can hear in the stillness. 

Ah well, another fine day and Africa is alive and I am grateful for my returning health, my bed, the bucket bath and all that means I am alive in Africa.