HEALTH 1

Yay! We finally have time for a quick personal health update! Anyone who has traveled in the ‘third world’ knows that health is one of the most exciting parts of any sojourn here. I was close to calling this column the ‘Poop Scoop’, like I did one my trip to Asia, but then I remember I’m now an envoy from the US Government and have to maintain some level of dignity. I have to admit that after nine months in Asia with relatively few health problems, I came into Africa with kind of a been-there-done-that-so-what’s-a-little-endemic-yellow-fever attitude. Of course, those of you who know me well also know that my middle name is Hubris, and Africa wasted no time in reminding me why it was the last continent to be colonized by us weak-blooded European types.

The first bizarre health issue arose within the first night, when I pulled off my socks and discovered, already, a huge blackened blister on my right toe. Mysterious and only slightly painful, I expect it was just my toe trying to fit in around here. With a little care and attention, it has realized that fitting in is a lost cause, and the blackness has subsided. The next few days brought varying levels of heatstroke and exhaustion. La Turista reared its ugly head a little sooner than I expected, on the third day. This, of course, was also the day that I moved out of my room with private bath, and I had completely forgotten Travel Rule #4: “Always bring your own TP” (or was that a corollary to Rule #1: “Go when you can”?). This necessitated a quick and uncomfortable hop around town in search of a roll, but my efforts were successful, and while we say in the tropics that bowel movements are “never the same as back home”, they have been largely tolerable since. Knock on wood…

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was more or less fasting during the day for Ramadan. This was a little bit exhausting, but I think it also helped a bit with getting my system used to the bugs around here. The first weekend at the Foundation Charles Dafour (FCD), I broke fast to accept an invitation to eat lunch with the clan (none of which are evidently practicing Muslims), but I paid for it later. Later that night, one of the guys from the FCD took a couple of us guests out to one of the local outdoor bars for a beer. Burkina has a couple of local brews, one of which is called ‘Brakina’ (with a name like that, it has to be good!), and is one of the cheaper brands. I ordered a bottle to try it out. I don’t know if it was the food I had earlier, the dehydration, or just the quality of the beer, but with my first taste of Brakina, all I could think of was the dirty local water that I’m not supposed to drink. Each successive gulp continued to go straight to my puke sac, as opposed to my old friend, the happy drunk sac. As we got up to leave, it was too much for me. If anyone is wondering if projectile vomiting is an effective tactic if you want to win over a cute Belgian jeweler who is in Burkina studying African bronze working and whom you’re desperately trying to impress with whatever wit and charm you can muster in your broken French, the answer is, unfortunately, self-evident. In addition, if anyone is wondering how my lovelife is going here, that answer is also self-evident… i.e. business as usual!

Sometime into my second or third week… about the time I was hanging out with the ATB, I came down with a mystery something that was exhausting and a bit debilitating. After stumbling around all day in the normal Ouaga daze, I had a series of severe and almost painful chills in the middle of the night. I managed to stagger to the bathroom and puke my guts out, and that seemed to help. I could get back to sleep and the next day, while I had a splitting headache and felt completely drained, I didn’t really have a fever. Was this food poisoning? Or my first major battle with malaria? Or something else? We may never know. Malaria is a serious problem here, and my medication, as psychosis-inducing as it is, still only wards off the development of serious life-threatening forms of the disease, and I’m still open to infection. It’s in me and at constant war with my system, which might be one of the reasons I’m generally pretty exhausted. There’s not much I can do… mosquitoes, especially at FCD, are rampant and unavoidable. But each morning, I awake to find literally dozens of little dead bodies that have been trapped between the floor fan and the mosquito net, their little lives squeezed out in what I can only hope is the persistent and unimaginable pain of being crushed against tiny nylon webbing, and I swell with pride to know that I am doing my little part in Africa’s war against malaria.

What else? My first major sunburn wasn’t until the third week, which I guess was surprising. I got a nasty runny nose on my trip to the west, which could have been just my normal November allergies compounded with the dust here. Few wildlife programs and nature guidebooks discuss the wonders of the boogers of Africa, which is a shame since they are some of the largest and most majestic in the world, and have some of the most fascinating habits.

In general, I’m surviving. It’s only been a month and some change, but I have already regressed to scrawny, sunburnt, Jesus mode. My belt has become three sizes too big for me, and, yes, unfortunately, the beard is back… though hopefully not for long. There is something exhausting about life here, and I chalk it up to a number of factors: the heat (obviously), the dust, the difficulty getting around, the slow pace of life, the constant war with malaria and other microbes, the constant mental drain of the French language, the general lack of nutrition in the food here (which consists mostly of rice or pasta and sauce, and is reminiscent of my college days), et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of that pales in comparison to the exhaustion faced after spending all morning writing blog entries and realizing that you’re still two-and-a-half weeks behind. Aargh!!! Accounts of my adventures in Burkina’s wild west are coming soon… I swear!