Kenya Dig It? ~ Plumber Up

When you’re about to go to a MALARIA-ridden area, you get a lot of literature from the health clinic about it. You get the Life Cycle of the Parasite, advice for the best bug killing spray that won’t give you cancer, an obsessive list of all the symptoms, and of course the giant bottle of prophylactic pills. MALARIA was a huge threat, a horrible tropical parasitic disease that would result in a long, lingering death. “You’re going to get MALARIA!” everyone told me when I said I was going to Africa. “And even if you don’t die, it’ll never go away!”

 

So when a miserable fever and aching joints, not to mention a positive return on my unfailing Orange Test,* turned out to be MALARIA, the response people at home gave to the news was not optimistic. In fact, it seemed to be something along the lines of “RED ALERT DARKEN THE BRIDGE WE GOT MOVIE SIGN ABANDON SHIP.” I was, they were sure, going to have to be shipped home in a Hefty bag.

 

But this was a bit of a surprise to me, because by the time I actually got it, I had forgotten about this reaction.

 

Because when you actually get to a MALARIA-ridden area, you rapidly discover something: it’s a pretty straightforward disease, with a pretty straightforward treatment. Oh, so the three-year-old has malaria? Eh, poor kid. Let’s get her to the doctor; she’ll be all right in a week. Doc says you’ve got malaria? Well, are you taking your meds? Then quit whimpering. You’re embarrassing your host family.

 

Now, this is not to say that it can’t be fatal. Every family has a relative who died from it. And of course, there are places where it ravages the population, since treatments aren’t available—and that’s what people see on posters here in the US, making it seem even more horrible. But that was not the norm around my place. The norm was a week of antibiotics and painkillers, and since I didn’t get any sort of digestive symptoms (hallelujah), I basically had Victorian heroine disease—faintness, fever, achiness, and no indelicate symptoms. The worst thing I got was a mood crash, to which my host family was overwhelmingly unsympathetic. I lounged around tragically for a few days, then cowboyed up and went back to classes. Dangit, quit milking your illness. It’s just malaria, fer cryin’ out loud.

 

So my experience with this ravaging illness was largely anticlimactic.  Although I did make one interesting discovery about alternative treatments while I was there. I was lying around feeling weak and pathetic, when from out in the living room I heard one of the most familiar sequences of blips and bloops to ever embed itself in my skull.

 

The kids were playing Super Mario Bros.

 

I was up like a flash and out of my room, to find them all crammed around a game console of questionable legality, cheering on the one playing. I sat down. “Can I play?”

 

Eyes widened. “You know about Super Mario?” one said.

 

“You joking?” I said. “I grew up with this game! I know that song by heart!”

 

And then I realized that since hearing that song, I was feeling a hell of a lot better.

 

Yes.

 

The Super Mario Bros. song can alleviate malaria symptoms.

 

That discovery was worth the whole thing.

 

 

*See, I have this foolproof method for figuring out if I am about to get sick, or if a case of The Blahs I have is actually something. It’s a simple test, but it hasn’t been wrong yet. Here’s how it works: I open the fridge. There, on the top shelf, are the beverages. If the orange juice looks normal, then I am going to be okay. However, if the orange juice is under a beam of light, with choirs of angels singing around it as cherubim flit about tossing glittering confetti over it, then something is wrong. In this case, I nearly mugged the family’s maid for an orange.