Malaria and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The River Nile from Above - Home to many malarial mosquitos



Every Step You Take


Every step is a process and every process is an ordeal. That is the way things are here in Sudan. It took over a month to get to Malek and may take nearly as long to return. There are delays of days or weeks, transportation to procure and customs to follow. You cannot leave a home before the head of the home bids you farewell…….and that may be days away…..so you sit and you wait…….you wait with the others whose waits are infinitely longer than yours…….you sit, you nap, you sit some more….maybe you eat a bit – or take a walk, but nothing much gets done for long periods of time. But there are entire realities occurring behind the scenes. Conversations that I don’t understand and taboos being broken – and spoken. There is a world than I can understand on some levels – but no culture brings a foreigner entirely into its inner sanctums – it’s a cultural Skull and Bones.

Every step is a process and every process is an ordeal – part 2.

Getting on to the internet has been quite a challenge. With beginner’s luck, I met Abot who worked at Catholic Relief Services who gave me free and unlimited access to a fairly dependable network in Yei. Then I found a UN facility in Juba where I just walked through the front door and waved to a guard who upon seeing a white man, assumed I must be with the UN and just let me in.

Upon returning to Yei (I have yet to fill in the missing two weeks in Bor and Malek – this shall come soon) I was informed that Abot was at the head office in Nairobi and I would have to use the privately owned internet shack located about a mile from the compound where I was staying. It is literally a shack with a generator and satellite dish connected to it. I had just returned from my trip up north where I did not take my computer and wanted to type up my notes before going to the internet site. Of course, my computer had no juice left and the compound has no electricity, so I had to take it to an electricity charging place, which is actually a barber shop with a generator and power strip. After five hours, I had to pick my laptop. Then I had to sit down and input my adventures onto the MacBook. So I sit by my hut and begin to write. Within minutes, there are five young men watching over my shoulders, amazed at anyone can type without looking and wanting to try. While they wait their turn on the computer, they attempt to read each word as I type it. Soon they want their pictures taken with the built-in camera. Someone stops by with a bootleg dvd of a Chuck Norris movie which a friend had picked up for him in Kampala and would like to watch it on the computer. We go into the hut and in the dark, we watch Chuck go deep into his mind where he finds the wisdom of his Yoda-like karate trainer which brings him super-human strength and allows him to defeat a multitude of men of all races while the crowd cheers him on. Everyone in the crowd is Asian except for one blonde woman who will fall in love with him. I have no idea how she got there, but she managed to get front row seats in the arena. I fell asleep at some point and must have missed the deeper meaning of it all. By the time I wake up, the movie is over, the guys are just sitting around waiting for me to awaken, but not wanting to disturb me, and the computer’s battery is drained. The DVD is still inside the computer. Chuck Norris will guard the MacBook until I can release him upon charging.

Next day, I go to get it charged. So far I have maybe had the chance to write five sentences……five hours later, I pick up the computer and I’m ready to go…….this time I get a bit more writing done, but there is no one to escort me to the internet shack. If you remember, I am not permitted to walk through the town unescorted – American hatred, Al Qaida, drunken Dinkas………they say it’s safe out there – but just not for me. Hours later –Malek, my designated escort and protector of the day arrives and we walk the mile and the facility is open, but the satellite is down and there is no Internet connection. So we return the next day – we walk the mile in the heat and get there and find out that they are working on fixing the bug and it should be fixed any minute. We settle in – and leave two hours later – without ever having made a connection with cyberspace.

ThIs Time It’s Me Who Has the Bug – or: Why I haven’t updated the blog

Next day, we make plans in the morning to go later in the afternoon to go on the internet. By about 10 am, I’m feeling a bit weak and achy – I must be dehydrated. I send some kids to get me bottled water and by the time they come back, I’m in bed feeling a bit weak. I probably just need a nap. I sleep for about seven hours and by the time Malek comes by and says: “You want Internet?” I am realizing that something is going on with my body.. I take my temperature and it’s about 100°F. I lie in bed and begin to do the Fahrenheit/ centigrade conversions in case things get bad. The calculations keep me focused and I try to remember the formula. I remember how to calculate from centigrade to Fahrenheit: F=C x 1.8 + 32. Not sure why I remember this. I also remember that 37° C = 98.6 F. I begin to drift off into dreamy world of travels through of Barcelona in the winter where I wished the temperature would hit 10° C which was equal to 50°F…then I drifted to summers in Israel where the temperature was always in the high 30’s and when it hit 40° it was time to go sit in water somewhere.

As these thoughts danced around my head, my joints were beginning to hurt and it seemed to be getting very cold outside. No one is coming to disturb me figuring that I’m just tired and want to sleep. I try to get out of bed and I collapse on the floor, my legs too weak to hold my weight…..i find some covers and put them over me………..and it’s still cold……….i put in the thermometer and it’s over 101°…..that’s how many degrees….let’s see 37° is normal, so 38° = 100.4° F, 39° = 102.2, and 40° is a very hot 104° - thank god, I’ll never get there…..or so I thought……………the night went on and I was beginning to talk to myself and no longer trying to move – it hurt to breathe, it hurt to turn, it hurt to pick up my head….the temperature began to climb and my body felt as if someone had beaten the crap out of me. I became obsessed with taking my temperature and watching the temperature climb………101…..101.5 (the oldies radio station, I thought), 102……….102.5 (classical music in Boston)……….103………I was shivering and all alone in the hut…..it felt like there were knives in my neck, back, kidneys….i realized that I didn’t even know where my kidneys were…. somewhere near my liver? ………..my kidneys definitely hurt…… .103.5 ……..it’s freezing here in Africa………I have to pee…….i barely climb out of bed and barefoot, I leave the hut and fall over – my legs are like rubber….i get up, holding the straw of the roof between my fingers……I guide myself to the tree and, holding on to the tree with one hand, get my business done……….i don’t remember getting back into bed, but I remember seeing the thermometer hit 104. At that point, people came into the hut and realized that I was quite ill. They congratulated me and welcomed me to the malaria club. They all told me that they’ve had it dozens of times and it will just go away, eventually. They described my symptoms perfectly. When I described the feeling that it felt like there was a knife stuck in my back that was digging into my heart, they all laughed. “The devil’s spear!”

It seems like I just had a common case of malaria – something that every Sudanese person has had dozens of times in their life. I was taking anti-malaria pills, but when I checked the thermometer and it was over 104°, I had this thought: I would have an impact on what my doctor would tell patients in the future. He had said to me: Take the malaria medicine every day and you should be fine. I don’t anyone who’s gotten malaria with this medicine. I couldn’t wait to tell him, so he could now tell patients: Take the malaria medicine. It’s very reliable and I only know one person who actually contracted malaria - and that was in Sudan.” This is what I thought about as my fever spiked.

With the help of some of my remaining Advils, the fever eventually dropped and I began to heal. It was not a short, nor pleasant process. I’m still feeling the after-effects……….