My mom's never been one to mince words, even when I was little. Probably because of her medical background, she's shamelessly frank about the body, it's parts and functions. I was drilled to use terms like 'bowel movement' and 'sexual intercourse' from an early age instead of their cruder counterparts. More recently, I've heard the horror stories of her home nursing career: the lady bed-ridden with sores and being slowly eaten by maggots; interning a man to the hospital with a dead rodent in his ass.
So she spared me no gruesome details in her battle with Africa's microbiology.
"Everywhere you turn, something's trying to lay eggs in you," she told me, resting comfortably in a friend's care in Abbotsford, BC. Finally back from her 80-day sojourn to Mozambique, I wondered why she'd been back for a week and I hadn't heard from her - turns out she has malaria. On the scale of things that can go wrong in Africa it's a mere nuisance, she said, well worth contracting because it meant she didn't have to sleep with a mosquito net in the interminable heat. With proper treatment it's only a day or two of discomfort followed by a couple months of feeling kinda tired, hardly the colonial-era mass-murderer that branded Sub-Saharan Africa 'White Man's Grave'.
"Oh, and I have to go to the doctor on Wednesday to get de-wormed."
Besides the aerial bombardment of insect matter from mosquitoes, tsetse flies and rinderpests there's the worms in the fruit; in the meat; even the sand on the beach isn't safe. "Walk barefoot and they'll bore into the bottom of your feet and go right up your leg into the large intestine," adding that an unfortunate colleague of hers was anally intruded upon by some spiral-boring sand worms while sitting on the beach. She theorized that her parasitic co-habitants had come from the mystery goat 'meat' (see: junk and ass parts) found in the stew, oddly proud that it didn't give her the same noxious diarrhea that had befallen fellow missionaries.
She took it all in stride though, and focused our conversation on the positives: the spiritual revival and longing for salvation she'd expected, pledging to put a family of orphaned siblings through school, learning some Swahili and Portuguese and, most of all, simply surviving the ordeal.
4 comments:
A few years ago, a fellow religion and culture student had gone overseas and gotten Malaria (I forget which country). She kept optimistic about the whole experience, but as she was telling me about it, all I could think of was, damn... if that were me, I'd be pissed.
I love that you labeled this entry "Trots."
Glad to hear she's home okay. Hopefully, it won't deter you from going yourself at all. We're still waiting on that life update, you know ...
Yep, my mom taught me the word trots, even though it doesn't really fit with her proper word philosophy.
Yes Mike, the life update is coming... Geez, who leaves harassing comments about failing to post promised updates?
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