The best excuse for not returning emails

This past Thursday our group left for a whirlwind tour of the northern region of Ghana: 7 hour bus ride to Kumasi, 5 hours to Tamale, 3 more hours to Bolga and 1 hour to Paga on the Burkina Faso border. I have very little to report from the trip because I have been positively diagnosed with malaria. That's right- malaria. My blood donating days are over. My symptoms were a sore throat and a cough leading to chills, fever and delerium that presented on Thursday in a bus crammed with UC students. I laid my head on the window and have very little memory of what's happened. Generally there are only a few highlights that come to mind, but I'll try to give you as much of the story as I can muster.

I was delirious for pretty much the whole ride up to Kumasi. I don't remember a thing about it except that the bus broke down and we were stuck at a rest stop for hours waiting for a replacement smaller more cramped bus. I remember sitting at the rest stop unsure of where I was looking in the distance at the tropical foliage and mountains that could be clouds or clouds that could be mountains (I'm still not sure which). I ate a little ice cream and gazed at the faces of people whose names I knew but who I didn't really know well and at the multicolored lizzards crawling on the walls, and listened to the Bob Marley music they were playing in honor of his birthday. It was the most disoriented I've been in a long time, but I continued the trip to Kumasi and Tamale.

We were eating dinner on Friday and I was miserable thinking I wanted so badly to see my family and friends or at least to be somewhere with potable running water and available food that wasn't fried chicken. I missed home. Everyone in the group was really nice, checked in and asked how I was feeling and offered whatever help they could give me, but there's no substitute for home and family and friends who you already know and love. At that point Irene Odotei showed up out of nowhere (she had apparently flown up to Tamale because this is the first time the program has done a trip to the north and she wanted to check in with us). We call her 'Auntie Irene' because Auntie is a common title to give someone your parents' age who you interact with. I just wanted to get up and scream 'You're not my auntie! I'm not related to you!' but I was tired, so I walked silently to my room and laid down. We were staying at the Catholic Guesthouse in Tamale and I was rooming with Wes, one of the other boys. I sat on my bed and looked up to see a crucifix attached to the top of the far wall. Unwilling to deal with it, I turned off the light only to find that the Jesus on the crucifix glowed in the dark! Frusterated, I fell asleep.

The next day I went to the clinic. The north is rural and spaced out but Tamale (the town we were in) is the fastest growing city in West Africa. Still, the clinic was rough. I paid 10 cedi (1 cedi= 1 dollar) to get in, they took my blood pressure and weight and asked me to wait behind door number 5 like a gameshow. The clinic was basically an open corridor that made a square with doors and consulting rooms on the right side. While waiting, I went on a quest to find a bathroom and after encountering many chickens and goats just meandering about I finally found a hole in the ground labelled 'urinal'. I went back and waited more. There is no triage system, so the people waiting varied from looking fine to a teenager sprawled unmoving on a strecher. Kelly, Mac and Aaronson were with me waiting in the corridor just watching the ailments of other patients. At one point a woman who had been cradling and consoling a crying baby came over and just put it in Kelly's lap. She came back and explained that her son had never seen white people and was afraid of her. She gave her son to Kelly to prove that she wasn't any different from the other people around. I was eventually called into a room and met my doctor, a woman who studied in Cuba and moved to Ghana. She took a list of my symptoms and at first said I was suffering because of the dry weather. I explained my symptoms again and noted that I was especially sickly green pale (seriously- I hadn't seen myself in a mirror until the day before and I have never looked more pale than that. I thought I might have lost blood but I had that green tinge). The doctor responded 'You're not pale, it's just the color of your skin'. I protested that indeed I am white but my skin is not generally what I would describe as a sickly green color. A nurse came in and began speaking Spanish to the doctor. After a while I joined in and she jumped saying 'I thought I could talk and you wouldn't understand me.' She warmed up to me immediately and said I probably also had malaria, prescribed tylenol, a multivitamin, a cough syrup and a malaria medication. I went to the pharmacy, waited for the drugs, collected them, took the first malaria pill, and we all stumbled out of the clinic catching a taxi to the 'grocery store' in town with no refrigeration. I settled for some bread, jam and peanut butter, and ate nothing else for the next two days.

We got back to Tamale and Kelly made me some great PB&J sandwiches and I had bought some kiwi-cranberry juice to get some sugar in me. I ate one sandwich and a cup of juice and lay on my bed in the quiet next to an open window and slept for an hour. I dreamed that I learned how to play the harp, which was awesome. I woke up a short time later, still felt shotty, comiserated with day-glow Jesus, ate another sandwhich and fell asleep again. This is when I had my amazing dream that was very vivid. I was back at home and woke up in my bed. I saw my family, took a shower and felt better. I walked downstairs and saw Julia Gitis who was smiling broadly. She told me to follow her outside, and I did. All around my parents house, my adorable friends had set up a HUGE street party. There were video screens over all the houses, several music stages, some cows for some reason, and I talked individually to each person that I had spent the last two days missing tremendously. I had wished that I could spend one day at home without having to travel and then come back to Ghana. I woke up looking out my window to a slight breeze blowing through a pink-blossomed tree and my fever had broken. I started to feel better. After a few more naps, I joined the other three at the Jungle Bar down the street to watch the Ghana vs. Cote d'Ivoire third place match (Ghana had been bumped after losing to Camaroon in a semi-final match. Egypt eventually beat Camaroon to claim the cup for the 6th time, the most any nation has won it). We returned home to find that the rest of the group had returned from their trip to Bolgatanga where they had sat on live (domesticated) crocodiles, seen slave camps of the north, and drove to Paga, the town on the border between Ghana and Burkina Faso. They were all sunburnt but excited, and I'll make the trip up there one of these days. We went out to dinner and I went to bed early except that the cough syrup that was prescribed to me gave me a host of side-effects including nausea, 'nervousness' and dizziness all without the main effect of actually preventing the cough. I eventually fell asleep.

The next day we drove back to Kumasi and I called my parents. That came very close to initiating an international relations nightmare between the US and Ghana, but they were very helpful and booked an appointment for me the next day at a clinic in Accra (the capital) that all of the ambassadors and buisinessmen (read:white people) go to when they're sick. Before we left Kumasi, we stopped at the clinic there because another girl, Ali had developed similar symptoms. She got similar treatment, and while the clinic at Kumasi was nicer, there was no triage and still very few resources available to treat patients- a small lab that could do blood tests but nothing of great value. We mostly slept through the 6 hour journey back to Accra but Sharon (the woman in charge of the UC EAP office in Accra) met us as we arrived, passed out dinner to everyone and let Ali and I drop off our bags before she wisked us away to the hospital. This was clearly closer to first world medicine. We signed up, saw a doctor, got all of the tests we might need (my parents had given me a list of about 8 including a chest x-ray), got a prescription for better malaria treatment (the pharmacist actually laughed at what we showed him we had been taking, which was not terribly comforting) and we followed up with the doctor to interpret the tests. Both of us were negative for malaria but (and here's a valuable lesson for you) were still diagnosed positive with the disease (especially in light of the fact that we had both reacted well to the malaria medication we have, even if it wasn't the best stuff out there). Malaria lives and breeds in fatty tissue, especially the liver. If it has spread to the blood (ie if the blood test is positive), it has burst at the seams and you need super crazy advanced treatment. So we took our new drugs home, told everyone the news, ate a quick dinner, took the first set of pills and went to sleep. It was good to have it all figured out. So that's my story about my first and hopefully last encounter with malaria, and my really good excuse for not having any pictures of Northern Ghana. I'm a little sleepy and still have a cough but I'm getting better rapidly. I love and miss you all and know that I was thinking about you when the going got tough. Be well