First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria

by Eve Brown-Waite

  “Hmm …” Dr. Stockley read the brief report that we had been given on the way out of the radiologist's office. “Says here you are unequivocally not pregnant. But if I had to wager a bet, I'd say you are pregnant.”

  “Wait a minute!” Now I was thoroughly exasperated. “What about the inconclusive tests? The clotting and unclotting? The ‘I'm going to miscarry’ theory and the really good radiologist you sent us to? You told me you thought I was pregnant, then you thought I wasn't pregnant. Now this guy tells me that I am definitely not pregnant and now you think I am! What am I supposed to think?”

  “I don't know about how it's done in America, but medicine here is definitely not an exact science. There could be any number of explanations for all your inconclusive tests. But the main thing is that we can reasonably rule out an ectopic pregnancy. So you can go back to Arua and relax a bit. If you feel pregnant, then you may well be pregnant. Nothing more we can do but just wait and see.”

  “Well, what about the sonogram? Could he have been wrong?”

  “Sure. Don't radiologists ever make mistakes in America?”

  “So what if he was wrong about my not having an ectopic pregnancy?”

  “Try not to worry too much about that. My guess is that if it is an ectopic pregnancy, you'll have so much pain and bleeding before your fallopian tube bursts, there'll be time to get to Kuluva Hospital and David Morton will have a good chance at saving you, if not your reproductive organs.”

  Oh, yeah. I was feeling better already!

  Dear Jean,

  I'm writing from Kampala, where I'm miserable and nauseous and no one can figure out if I'm pregnant or not. Or if I am pregnant, if I'm miscarrying. Oh, God! What were we thinking trying to get pregnant over here? What have we done? I suppose there is nothing we can do at this point but wait and see. John says it'll all be just fine. But he always says that!

  To help take my mind off of my misery, we rescued a desperate-looking rat of a puppy that we found hiding in the CARE compound and we're taking him up to Arua with us tomorrow. We caught him, fed him, flea-dipped him twice, and bathed him in puppy shampoo. He's all clean and shiny now and has warmed up to us. Me especially, which is too bad because his puppy smell is really making me want to puke and then die.

  Oh, yeah, we took the puppy to the vet because he looked so mangy and malnourished. This guy was truly amazing—barely lifted the dog two inches out of his box for all of two seconds and began prescribing medicines. No need for a pesky examination or anything. Hmmm … maybe I should go to see this guy about my situation!

  Well, if I am pregnant I'll be nearly seven months by the time I come home for your wedding. With you all tall and skinny and me short and round, we ought to look like a bat and a ball coming down the aisle!

  I'll keep you posted,

  Eve

  No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

  We were certainly hoping for an uneventful trip back to Arua. Well, as uneventful as can be when you're driving five hundred kilometers on dirt roads. With an unexpected cargo of four children. And a puppy. Only the puppy belonged to us.

  As we were preparing for our return trip, John's secretary, Nasra, radioed down from Arua and asked us to give a ride to her four young nieces and nephews. “They will be no trouble,” Nasra assured us. The memories and the smell of vomit still lingered from our ride down with Robert. As it turned out, he never did find his uncle and so came to the CARE office every day we were in Kampala, asking for food, money, and a ride back to Arua.

  One of the askaris shook his head as I gave Robert money for a bus ticket to Arua. “Your boy will never leave you alone now,” he said.

  “He is not my boy,” I answered. “I'm just helping him out.”

  “Well, he is your boy, now,” the askari said, as if he were imparting to me a basic lesson on Ugandan culture. “Madam, in Uganda if you pull a drowning man out of the Nile, you had better be prepared to buy him some dry clothes.” And feed him supper and maybe even give him a place to stay.

  But we just couldn't say no to Nasra. And so we were headed to Arua with four children and a dog and things were going surprisingly well. The children had been very well behaved, sharing a package of cookies that their mother had packed for them. Our puppy, Armstrong, however, had climbed out of his box and thrown up all over the back of the Pajero (what was it with that vehicle and vomit?). But the kids were happy to keep him company in the backseat.

  Suddenly, like a mirage out of the flat distance, a group of people came running toward us. As we got closer we saw that they were actually running toward a Land Rover that had flipped onto its side and was teetering precariously on the edge of the road just up ahead of us. We carefully maneuvered our way through the crowd and toward the vehicle. Two wheels were up in the air and its roof, now lying sideways, was scraped as if it had been dragged along the ground. Someone waved us over and asked if we could help transport the wounded.

  “John?” I put my hand on his arm as he pulled the vehicle over to the side of the road. “What about what the embassy told us?” We had been told of stories of mzungus who had pulled over to help and were then accused of causing the accident in an attempt by the victims to extort money. And then, of course, there's the whole drowning man thing.

  “We have to help, Eve. Don't worry. It will be fine.” Saint John actually believed that if you pulled a drowning man out of the Nile River you ought to at least teach him to swim.

  We were directed by several bystanders to a round, genial-looking white man, the only mzungu in the crowd. Despite the wadded handkerchief he held to his bald head, blood was trickling onto his face, settling into the creases around his eyes.

  “This Italian father is a good man,” we were told by a young Ugandan as he walked the bleeding priest toward our vehicle. “Could you take him to the police post up the road?”

  “Certainly,” John said. “But wouldn't he rather us take him to the clinic for treatment?”

  “No, no,” protested the injured priest. “This is just a superficial head wound. I'd rather go directly to the police and report the accident.” We had also been warned by the embassy about the severe punishments for being involved in an accident and not reporting it to authorities.

  “Are there any others who need help?” I scanned the group.

  “No,” one of the bystanders assured me. “It is only the father who is seriously injured.”

  “Shouldn't he be taken too?” I pointed to a man sitting in an obvious haze on the side of the road. Blood was oozing from the top of his head.

  “Oh no, he is Ugandan,” someone piped up. “He will be okay.”

  I walked over and saw that his head and arm were both bleeding heavily. “Do you need help?” I asked. He said nothing and stared off into the distance. We decided to take him with us.

  We squeezed the children and Armstrong into the back with the luggage and all the goodies from my shopping binge, and guided the two injured men onto the backseat.

  “The police post is just ten kilometers up the road,” we were told by someone in the crowd. “You cannot miss it.”

  We drove for fifteen kilometers not seeing anything that resembled a town or a police post, until we were stopped by a huge, spiked metal slab lying in the middle of the road. Three soldiers were reclining on the side of the road, against the trunk of an ancient baobab tree. Seeing the CARE logo on the side of the vehicle and a mzungu at the wheel, the soldiers waved us on from the shade of the tree's gnarled branches.

  “Officers,” John pulled over and called out to the still-reclining soldiers. “We need some help.”

  “Was there a shooting?” one of the soldiers asked with a look that can only be described as glee.

  “No. No shooting,” I answered. “But a car accident. We need to get to a police post.” One of the soldiers got up, slung his AK-47 over his shoulder, walked to our vehicle, and stared into the backseat.

  “We need a police post,” I repeated. The two other soldiers a
lso stood and began peering into the window.

  “Was there a shooting?” one of them asked again.

  “No,” I answered again. “But there was a car accident. A vehicle accident,” I corrected myself, remembering that in Uganda we traveled in vehicles, not cars. “And we need to get help.”

  “Was there a robbery?” the other one asked, clutching his rifle excitedly.

  “No, a vehicle accident!” I repeated as the soldiers continued flinging questions at us.

  “What happened?” asked one.

  “Was another vehicle involved?” chimed another.

  “Is the vehicle still there on the road?” asked the third.

  “Where is it?” pinged number one.

  “Should we go?” ponged number two.

  “Can you take us there?” Shoot and score from number three. I had been wondering just how long it would be before the soldiers asked us for a ride.

  “The vehicle these men were driving swerved off the road and turned over,” John said. “It happened about fifteen kilometers back.” The soldiers listened, nodded earnestly, and began questioning us again.

  “Five kilometers back?” one asked.

  “Can you take us there?” asked another.

  “Was there a shooting?” asked the third.

  “We need a police post,” John said.

  “Oh, yes,” one of the soldiers said. “You need a police post.”

  “Well, where would we find a police post?” John wasn't even trying to mask his frustration.

  “Continue on this road,” one of the soldiers offered. “You will get to Myenga. There is a police post there. There is a sign on the road so you cannot miss it.”

  John shifted into gear and began to pull to the left of the roadblock when one of the soldiers put his face into my window.

  “By the way, do you have any cigarettes?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then how about a newspaper?”

  We left him in a cloud of red dust and found the Myenga police post, which amounted to three tin roundhouses scattered in a dirt clearing. Three half-naked children, a woman with a baby on her exposed breast, and a monkey were sitting in the tiny sliver of shade made by the slight overhang of one of the tin roofs. A man dressed in dark pants and a blindingly bright orange shirt came out of one of the huts to greet us.

  “Yes, mzee,” he said, addressing John, who, while not an old man, often got the respectful Swahili title of “mzee” simply because he had a beard. I asked around a lot, but no one could tell me the equivalent for respectfully addressing an older woman. “How can I help you?”

  “There's been an accident on the road a few kilometers back,” John explained. “The people involved would like to make a police report.”

  “Ah … then you have come to the right place. I am the chief of police.”

  “We've got two people with head injuries,” I said, getting out of the car. “And we need to get them some medical attention.”

  “Why yes, madam,” the police chief said, gingerly taking my arm. “You can come right inside here and we will take care of you.” He began to lead me into one of the huts.

  “Not me. I'm fine,” I said, yanking my hand free. Well, I might be pregnant… might not be … but I doubt you can help me with that.

  “These men need help,” I said, pointing to the bleeding and dazed passengers in the backseat of our car.

  “I will direct you to the clinic and take their report there.” He jumped into the backseat, shoving aside the injured men, and directed us to a small cement building that was just across the road.

  People seemed to appear out of nowhere as we helped the two men out of the car. A man in a dirty lab coat came out of the clinic building. “Welcome to Myenga Clinic,” he said. “You will receive good medical care here.” Whatever slight confidence this might have instilled faded immediately as he left the bleeding and shocked Ugandan on the front step and rushed the Italian inside. It was fifteen minutes more before someone came out to attend to the ashen and shaking Ugandan.

  Something else to tell my friend who was convinced that black people couldn't be racist, I thought. If not racism, what was it that caused white people to be singled out for special attention, while black people were ignored. It's just Ugandan hospitality, I'd sometimes tell myself, because let's be honest, I enjoyed the special treatment. (Who wouldn't?) Being white branded me as a foreigner and Ugandans are unfailingly kind to guests. Maybe being bumped to the front of the line or given a seat in the shade is not the same as letting a black man bleed while a less injured white man is attended to. But maybe they are simply two not-so-distant points on the same discrimination spectrum.

  I tried not to think too much about this dilemma—for it was constant—as John and I cleaned the blood off of the backseat. I'd worked around people with AIDS long enough to not be particularly frightened of simply wiping up the nearly dried blood; we had no open sores that it would get into. But the man in the dirty white lab coat ran out and handed us gloves. “You must be careful of HIV slash AIDS,” he warned.

  As we cleaned up and reorganized the children and the dog and got ready to go, the chief of police tried to get us to drive him back to the scene of the accident. We were saved only by the intervention of the bandaged-up priest who insisted that we'd already been helpful enough. By the time we finally got back on the road to Arua, the entire population of Myenga had gathered to watch us. Everyone was abuzz about the accident—or perhaps the shooting—that had happened and the three mzungus—one with a bleeding head—who'd come to the clinic.

  The rest of the trip on that long, red road was uneventful. Well, as uneventful as anything ever was in Uganda.

  Dear Mom,

  Well, John has really taken to our new dog, Armstrong, which is a good thing. Even though I was the one who insisted we rescue him from the streets of Kampala, as soon as we got home, I discovered that I can't stand the smell of him. (The dog, not John!) You should see John out there with him—he's building a doghouse. It's hysterical. John mentioned to one of the guards that he wanted to put a thatched roof on it. So at eight o'clock this morning the guard showed up at our house with two old women carrying huge loads of dried grass on their heads. Well, there was no way in hell that we were going to tell these women that they had just walked God knows how far with grass on their heads so that we could use it to build a doghouse. So John told everyone that he's building a house out back for his (very short) mother-in-law! And they just think he is the sweetest guy in the world.

  It stopped raining weeks ago. And now everyone stinks more than usual. I smell my own armpits. Still think my life is adventurous?

  I'll keep you posted,

  Eve

  The Smell of Sweat and Old Sex

  Let's face it: It was hard being in Uganda. Well, maybe not so hard for the Ugandans. In fact, I was always surprised at how happy everyone around me seemed to be. As long as it didn't kill them, they took their bouts of malaria in stride. They stepped their bare feet over the snakes, giant black ants, and palm-sized spiders that kept me from ever walking barefoot. No postage stamps this week? They did without mail. No meat in the market? They made stews out of the stinky dried fish that I felt guilty even feeding to my cats. No water? They cheerily dispensed with bathing.

  So let me rephrase my earlier statement: It was hard being me in Uganda. And it didn't seem like it was about to get easier. I still didn't have a definitive pregnancy diagnosis. The two days to my period predicted by the radiologist had come and gone with no period.

  I went back to see David Morton. “Let me try something a very wise professor taught me in medical school,” he said when I'd concluded our tale of medical misadventures in Kampala. “He taught us to ask our patients what they think is going on in their bodies. So what do you think, Eve? Do you think you're pregnant?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, thinking of the nausea that had recently become my constant companion. “Yeah,
I think I am pregnant.”

  “Well, then I'd say you're pregnant.”

  Here's the thing about being pregnant in Uganda. Just about everyone is pregnant in Uganda. Well, all the women of child-bearing years, that is. They were pregnant and walking for miles with huge loads of wood balanced on their heads. They were pregnant and nursing toddlers. They were pregnant and hoeing the fields. They were pregnant and nursing toddlers and hoeing the fields with huge loads of wood on their heads all at the same time. And smiling. Did I mention smiling? But me? I was pregnant and sick. Not much else. Forget tennis and badminton. Retching and whining soon became my only pastimes.

  We planned to celebrate our first Christmas in Uganda at a luxury resort in Entebbe. We'd spend the day lounging by the pool and then call our families to break the good news that night. Everyone at CARE had the week between Christmas and New Year's off and we were planning on joining a few friends on a real (not a bank) safari through a few of Uganda's national parks.

  On Christmas Day we did enjoy the pool and the phone calls. And after that we enjoyed nothing. The next day as we drove to Kampala, I was wrenched by intestinal cramps. We arrived at our friends' house, where I went immediately to the bathroom, explosively emptied my intestines, and proceeded to pass out on the floor. Since this scene repeated itself several more times over the next few hours, our friends went on safari without us. I couldn't possibly get back in a vehicle, so we stayed in their house and I spent the next two days running between the bed and the toilet. On the third day, John mopped me up and carried me to dear old Dr. Stockley.

  “Enjoying this pregnancy, I see?” chuckled the good doctor/ humorist.

  “No, I am not enjoying it. But this shitting my brains out is a whole new dimension.”

  “Do you think you can produce a sample for me?” He handed me a plastic cup.

  “Let's see, it's been twenty minutes since my last bout of explosive diarrhea. Without a doubt.” I took the cup and went into the bathroom while John and the doctor chatted in his office.