Malaria & a trip to a Malawian Hospital

Yep its true…I had Malaria…Gastric Malaria to be exact. It all started on a Thursday. My stomach had not been feeling well and I was in and out of the bathroom all day. Then in the middle of the night that night I woke up with a fever, aches and chills. I didn’t think much of it, took some advil, and went back to sleep. I stayed home from school Friday morning. I wasn’t feeling too bad, but I decided I probably shouldn’t push it. Good thing I didn’t go because as the morning progressed I got worse and worse. I continued to rush in and out of the bathroom with all imaginable things that go along with the word gastric (haha) and my fever returned even higher than the night before (it topped out at 102). All I could do was lay on the couch all day, wrapped up in my sweatshirts, going in and out of naps. Blahhh…as you all know being sick is not fun…but being sick in the village with no toilet and only a tiny hole makes everything a hundred times more challenging.  Yuck! By Friday night Gloria decided I should probably go to the hospital the next morning. Now the hospital sounds so extreme but you have to understand that there are no doctors offices around here. Go figure. So if you are sick at all…from a little cough to an extreme case of Malaria you go to the hospital. So Saturday morning we set out for the nearest relatively good hospital…not the most basic village hospital but not the best big hospital in Lilongwe (the capital city) either. We decided that we would try this hospital first and if I still wasn’t better in a few days then I would make the big trip to the city hospital. So we drove about 1.5 hrs to Kapiri to the Catholic “medium-sized” village hospital. When we walked in the waiting room was jam-packed! (after all it was Saturday) I had to go to the bathroom soooo bad when we arrived so we found a staff woman to ask her for some help. While I was in the bathroom Gloria I guess talked to the woman about me being sick and asked her if there was anyway she could help us get through the waiting room faster. I am pretty sure that the only reason she agreed to help get me through faster was because I was an Azungu (white person). The whole arrangement was very frustrating to me (once I realized what was happening) because on the one hand the last thing I wanted to do was jump ahead of everyone in line and just walk right in to see the doctor…continuing to confirm local beliefs that white people are something super special and are more important and better than Malawians…on the other hand though I REALLY REALLY wasn’t feeling well and had we waited in the line we probably would have waited all day until the hospital closed and still would not have made it to see the doctors (there were only two that day). As it ended up the lady just led me right into the doctors office and I didn’t have the energy to argue. L Once I got in there all the doctor did was ask me my symptoms! No checking of height, weight, blood pressure…all the usual American doctor office things…he just listened to my symptoms (high fever, body aches, a really bad headache, chills, diarrhea, nausea) and said “well you have malaria go to the lab and get tested”! Crazy! So then I walked down the hallway to the lab room. When I walked in there was another person in the room just finishing up their test. The whole situation made me a bit nervous. What the lab guy did was rub my finger with a little alcohol swab, then pricked it with a lancet, then rub the blood on a microscope slide, and then just laid the slide down in front of him. This is the same thing he does for every person. He wasn’t wearing any gloves or wearing special clothing, and he didn’t seem too concerned about everyone’s blood! All I could think about was what if one of the patients had AIDS? It just didn’t seem like a very safe situation. Oh well. So then I sat outside the room and waited for my results along with about 15 other people. There was one mother there with a very small child (maybe 1 years old) who at one point jumped up screaming her baby’s name, as he wasn’t responding, and ran down to the doctors. After awhile she came back and the baby seemed ok

One of the biggest things I learned through this whole experience was on Friday while I was watching Braveheart (thankfully my Ipod was fully charged so I could watch the whole thing!). Sorry if you have never seen it but I am going to talk about the end of the movie so if you don’t want to spoil it don’t read any further…at the end of the movie England captures William Wallace and is torturing him trying to get him to confess his allegiance to the King and betray his country of Scotland. Wallace never does and continues to be brutally tortured and basically ripped apart piece by piece. Well as I was watching that scene it reminded me of the scene from the passion of the Christ (if you haven’t seen it watch it) when Jesus is being flogged before his crucifixion. All I could think about was here I am lying on the couch feeling awful but this is NOTHING compared to what Christ endured for me!!! All of the trips to the bathroom and all the pain I was feeling was nothing compared to the sacrifice Christ made for me by being beaten, shamed, and then hung on a cross, so that I can live forever with Him in heaven!

Witchcraft in Dzuwa!!

Last week while I was teaching one of the teachers knocked on my “door” and asked to speak to me. After about two seconds I realized that he was TOTALLY drunk! I have a hard enough time trying to understand this teacher when he is speaking to me normally (his English isn’t very good). Add in the fact that he was drunk and mixing English and Chichewa…phew! I had such a hard time figuring out what he was trying to tell me! Eventually I was able to decipher what he was saying and was totally shocked by the news! He told me that his son (one of my students and one of the biggest trouble makers) was found out to be doing witchcraft!!!! I felt sooo sick to my stomach, sad, and had no idea how to respond. One of my own students!!! He said there was a man that had been coming in the middle of the night to the teachers houses and taking some of their kids off to do witchcraft without them knowing. He claims that my student could perform some kind of whistle that is a signature sign of witchcraft. Also he said that they had been traveling all over the world in one night (apparently they claim to be able to “fly” in an “airplane” anywhere in the world in seconds…don’t really understand how that is possible and its very hard for me to believe but who knows). He asked me to look out for his son, to treat him normally, and that this might be an explanation for why he misbehaves so much in class. I assured him that I would do that and that I would pray for him as well! He then took his son and rushed off to join a meeting with the school committee. The following day there were no classes and we held a big PTA meeting at the school. All the chiefs from the surrounding villages, all the teachers, the school committee, and a ton (not all) of parents were there to take part in the meeting. It was even harder that usual to sit there during a meeting all in Chichewa wondering what was being said, discussed, and decided! After I was briefed by another teacher on what happened…the village parents, committee, and chiefs discussed that either the “witch” (the man to took the kids) or the teachers would have to leave. Finally they decided that the witch would be the one to leave and gave him until 6am the next morning to pack up. I also learned that this was the same man that had already been kicked out of one of the villages for doing witchcraft and sent to live in isolation in an area behind the school. So now he was finally being kicked all the way out of the Dzuwa area and was told to never come back. At first that made me very sad because all I could think about was I wonder if anyone had ever reached out to him and his family to talk about Jesus with them. Later on that night I got to talk to Elliot and Gloria about the whole thing and they said that yes people had reached out to him and his family but that they wanted to have nothing to do with God. That made me feel a little better but I was still a little sad for the man. Please be praying for my student and his family…especially his father who I discovered through this process is an alcoholic (he is drunk quite often he has just never come to school drunk before). Two of the daughters in their family I have a special fondness of for too. Although the mom and dad don’t go to church, they almost every Sunday come (even though they are only 6 and 2 maybe)! They love to sit with the choir and go to all their practices! They are adorable! So be praying for them as well!

Flying Bugs & Bees

Ok now for some bug stories…first…after it rains there are these bugs that come out EVERYWHERE!! They come in some of the biggest swarms I have ever seen and love to just fly right into you! (gross!) Well although I think they are disgusting everyone here loves them…and especially likes to EAT them!!! (again gross!) So after big rainstorms it is very common to see all the kids outside (adults too…but not to the same extent) jumping and swatting at these bugs trying to get their wings to fall off so they can eat the bodies. It is actually a super funny and cute scene to watch (minus them eating the bugs). It reminds me of the kid game (not sure what its called) where there is this elephant that blows butterflies out of its trunk and kids are supposed to try to catch the butterflies with nets. Not sure what that is the image that comes to mind but it is! ...ok next story…for everyone who doesn’t know I am SUPER scared of bees! I had a bad experience as a child (I kicked a ball into a yellow jackets nest in the ground and they all swarmed at me and stung me!) so now anytime a bee comes around I run away…laugh if you want but I really don’t like them! Well recently I was walking home from school with two of my students (Ethero & Gilisaria). We saw this boy running towards us and I was thinking to myself “I wonder what he is doing?”. Well as he got closer I saw he was running from a HUGE cloud sized mob of killer bees!!!! (ok so I don’t really know if they were actually the real killer bee species but that is what I am calling them)  I immediately turned around and started running (with my huge school bag on my shoulder and my umbrella in hand!) and screaming!!!! I ran for about 50 yards and then the bees just flew right over my head!!! I was soooo scared!!! The girls I was walking with ran too and after we all started laughing! It must have been a pretty hilarious scene to watch an azungu with all her stuff running and screaming through the village! Speaking of hilarious scenes…one more funny story…doesn’t have to do with bugs but but you can pretend like it does so it fits with the heading J …ok so I ran to one of the women’s houses to remind her that it was her village’s turn to cook. This is a woman (magaedina) I am very close to and as I was leaving she decided to give me a chicken! So her daughter and her friend (Ethero & Gilisaria again) and another girl (Judy) (all of which are some of my favorite younger kids and ones I spend time with the most) decided to walk me home and carry the chicken for me. So we are walking and Ethero says to me “wait didn’t you run here? Aren’t you going to run home?”. I said no I don’t really want to run back (I had finished my workout and was enjoying just walking with them)”…but then I decided it would be pretty funny to show them how to fast walk! (Kelsey Gheesling!!!) So I said “lets just walk really fast!”…so we all started fast walking!! Gilisaria with the chicken in hand!! We walked super fast (look up fast walking if you have never seen it before...not sure if that is the exact term but try it) the entire way home! Through the peanut fields and corn fields...and past another village where everyone was busy sorting tobacco leaves and dropped everything they were doing to stand, stare, and laugh at us!!! Eventually Gilisaria started chasing Ethero with the chicken trying to get it to bite her! It was soooooooo funny!!! I really wish I had that one on video-tape!

OK wrapping it up…sorry this became a super long post!

The rains here are starting to become less and less frequent (YAY!!!) and all the huge puddles have for the most part dried up. It is still super hot but it is supposed to be starting to get cold soon (end of May I think…hopefully…I am soooooo excited for “cold” weather!) We are finishing up our 2^nd term at school on april 8^th so I will be testing my kids these next two weeks. On april 10^th I fly to Cape Town South Africa (a city I am dreamed of going to since middle school) for 12 days for my Easter Holiday! I am soooo excited! I am in desperate need of a break from the village and teaching. Please be praying that this break would be restful, a good time to reflect on my time so far, fun, and re-energizing to prepare me for my last 3 months!

Thanks for reading to the end J