First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria

by Eve Brown-Waite

  John came in a few minutes later. He sat beside me on the bed and stroked my back.

  “Is it gone? The rat? Is it gone?” I whimpered.

  “Yes, honey. It's gone. And you didn't shit it. It didn't come out of you. It was probably already in the toilet when you sat down. I asked James and Nasser. They say the rats climb up into the drainpipes when it gets very dry. They are looking for water too.”

  “You mean the rat was in the toilet the whole time?”

  “Yeah, it was already there.”

  “Oh my God, I shit on a rat! A rat was in the toilet when I sat down. Oh my God!” I didn't know which was worse, but I knew I would never enjoy a leisurely sit on the toilet again. “Can I go home?” I wailed.

  John rubbed my back some more. “Eve, this is home. For now, anyway.”

  I sat up and reached for a tissue. “I could go to my mother's. She has air-conditioning. And television. And water!” And no rats in the toilet.

  “Eve, I know you're miserable right now.” John put his arms around me. “But it's gonna get better. I promise. And I don't want you to leave. I want you here with me.”

  I blew my nose. “But how can you want me? I'm useless. I lay around all day feeling miserable and whining. I don't do anything!”

  “Eve, you are making our baby. You are doing the hardest work anyone can do. I know that. Stay here with me. I'll take care of you while you take care of the baby. It's all right if you're a little whiny and miserable.” A little? “Just stay here. I don't want you to go anywhere.”

  I wouldn't have left him even if I could, which I couldn't, because, let's face it, I could barely get out of bed. So I continued my regimen of lying around and doing nothing. Luckily, we now had Regina, so at least the house got clean and John and the cats got fed. I quietly moaned on the couch as Regina cheerily went about running the household, trying to make it seem as if I was in charge.

  “Eve,” she said. Regina was one of the few Ugandans who did not call me “madam,” and I loved her for that. “If it is okay with you, I will wait to make the cats' food until you go out.” This was Reginas polite way of telling me that (a) we were out of the dried fish porridge that we fed to the cats, (b) she had taken care of it, (c) she knew the smell of it cooking would make me wretch, and (d) I really ought to get off the couch at least for a little while.

  “Hoi,” Coby greeted me when I dragged myself down the road to her house. “Have some tea?”

  “I'll try some. Thanks.”

  “Feeling any better yet?” she asked, pouring tea out of a thermos that always seemed to be at the ready on her kitchen counter.

  “Well, the dysentery and malaria are gone. So that's an improvement. But I wonder if I will ever feel like eating again. And this can't be good for the baby.”

  “It will get better. I promise. At least I hope so. I'm not feeling so good myself lately.”

  “Coby?”

  “Bernard didn't want me to say anything until I was through the first trimester, but I'm pregnant too!” I told you there wasn't much to do around here at night.

  “Coby! We'll be pregnant together!” That was the best news I'd heard in weeks.

  “Yah. We can go through this together. Why not?” She smiled. And I smiled.

  I continued to feel miserable. Coby, tough Dutch cookie that she was, fared somewhat better. But because I now had Coby to commiserate with, things were a little bit easier on John.

  The dry season wore on and everyone beseeched the heavens for rain. Of course, we each did it in our own ways. So while our neighbors banged on their drums nearly every night, we expats kept threatening to wash our cars. But absolutely everyone watched the skies.

  “Ah, see those clouds? See how they are curling up?” Nasser pointed to the wispy white clouds in the watercolor blue sky. “That means the rains are on their way.”

  “When?” I asked, looking up into the damn postcard-perfect sky.

  Nasser shrugged. “When it rains.”

  Finally, in March, after four scorched months, I woke to a gentle tapping on our tin roof.

  “John.” I nudged him awake. The glowing blue face of the battery-operated clock on the dresser read 3:10 a.m. “John, what's that noise?”

  “I don't hear anything, honey. Go back to sleep.”

  I rolled over but the tapping continued, growing heavier and louder until it was beating down with the certainty of drums.

  “John! Wake up. It's raining!”

  “Oh, it's raining. That's good. We need rain,” he mumbled and rolled over.

  I lay there listening to the glorious symphony of water pounding the ground and pounding my roof. I imagined it beginning to fill my parched water tanks. The smell of must, like old smoke, escaped from the scorched earth like a sigh. The air suddenly felt lighter. “Thank you,” I whispered to no one.

  “Did you say something?” John yelled over the steady pounding that had fully woken him—and probably everyone—by now.

  “You know how I'm always wishing for things from home? Television and telephones and decaf cappuccinos?” I asked.

  “Snapple iced tea, bagels and lox, the Sunday New York Times, and—”

  “Yeah, yeah, all that. Well, right now, I don't want any of that. All I have wanted for days is this rain. This rain is better than all of that. Put together.”

  “I'm glad,” John said. He wrapped himself around me.

  “Hey, I'm a little hungry,” I said.

  “All right.” He leapt out of bed. “What can I get you?”

  “Well, you know what I'd really love. I'd love some cottage cheese.”

  “Yeah, well, that would be a tall order. Let me go see what I can find.” He padded off to the kitchen with a flashlight and returned a few minutes later. I could make out a bowl in his hand.

  “Pineapple?” he asked. I popped a piece in my mouth. It was sweet and juicy and perfect.

  “That's good,” I said and ate the entire bowl.

  We went back to bed and for the first time in months, I didn't want to be anywhere else.

  Dear Susan,

  Hi. I'm writing to you from the reception area of the district administrator's office, waiting for John to come out of a meeting with the men who run the Women in Development office. (Did I hear you say, “Duh”?) Three people are looking over my shoulder this very second because anything a mzungu writes must be interesting.

  So far pregnancy seems to be a lot like old age. Lots of weird aches, lots o' gas, backaches, gotta pee all the time, constipation and/or diarrhea. And don't even get me started on the nausea! I guess it's a bit like old age. And I don't just mean the symptoms. I mean, you feel so lousy that maybe death starts to look not all that bad. And with pregnancy, you feel so lousy that giving birth starts to look not all that bad.

  Did I tell you that last time we were in Kampala, we had dinner with a whole bunch of other CARE expats and that some of these folks have been with CARE for nearly twenty years and have been everywhere? Compared to these guys, John and I have never left the farm! But I don't think I'll still be doing this twenty years from now. Deep down inside, I think your brave friend Eve is really a scaredy cat. Sometimes I think what I want is to be able to say “I lived in (fill in the exotic location here) and did (fill in the bold adventure here).” But I'm not sure I'm really prepared for actually having to deal with the hardships of living in the exotic location or the discomfort of dealing with the bold adventure.

  Thank God, it started raining a couple of nights ago. But then all these termites came out of their giant termite mounds and it was like night of the living dead. Well, not dead, just flying white ants. And they got in everything, and they are really gross, and even more gross is that people here eat them! And two nights ago we had a bat flying around inside the house. I don't know who was more scared, me or it. But we were both running for cover. It eventually parked itself (wounded) in our bathroom sink (but we didn't know that). This, after John says to me, “It's out of the house
, dear. Now go brush your teeth!”

  I'll keep you posted,

  Eve

  Law and Order in the Wild West (Nile)

  “I want my tea now, madam!” the policeman on my front porch bellowed. It was both what he said and the way he said it that told me something was wrong. I put a thermos of tea out on the verandah every night for the guards. But no guard had ever asked for tea that early in the evening or in such a demanding tone. In fact, no guard had ever asked for tea. Few Ugandans I knew, and certainly none who worked for mzungus, would have thought it polite to ask so directly for anything.

  We had just cleaned up from dinner when the policeman made this unusual request. My friend Jane, who had so tidily packed up my undies when I left Ecuador, was visiting us. Just finishing up her final year of medical school, she was on her way to Kenya to do an internship. Stefano, one of the Italian doctors who lived on our road, had also joined us for dinner.

  “Congratulations, Eve,” Stefano said when he arrived, holding out a bottle of Italian red wine in his hand. “I hear you will soon be increasing the mzungu population of Arua by one!”

  “Stefano!” I said, feigning shock. “I can't drink this! I'm pregnant.” In fact, I had only recently begun to eat or drink anything again.

  “Beh,” he said in an expression that was the Italian equivalent of “pshaw!” “You Americans are too nervous! It's fine to drink a little bit of wine when you are pregnant. Italian women do it all the time! Just don't drink the whole bottle at once!” I immediately swore to return in my next life as an Italian woman!

  Since the bombing at the White Rhino Hotel back in October, we'd had armed police guards in our compounds at night and I never felt comfortable with them. Our own askaris I trusted completely. James and Nasser looked after us—and Armstrong—as if we were part of their families. When I went to Pauline and Terry's house now, it was usually their askari, John, who Pauline respectfully called “our mzee,” who greeted me. Mzee John shyly admitted to being a distant cousin of Idi Amin's, and, like Adam, he was a fascinating storehouse of knowledge about Ugandan politics and history.

  “You know after World War Two, the United Nations tried to give Uganda to the Jewish people to make a homeland,” Mzee John told me during one of our conversations. “I am sorry they did not accept it,” he went on. “Those Jewish people are clever and they would have done good things for Uganda.”

  Damn, I thought, practically drooling. If the Jews had accepted, maybe I'd be able to get some bagels and lox around here.

  Whenever we visited the Hatchards' house, it was usually Busiya, with his spear at his side and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, who opened the gate to greet us. I had given him carrot sticks and lectures about smoking whenever he was in our compound. I never knew what he actually understood until one night he showed up to substitute in my compound with a carrot hanging out of his mouth.

  “I have a dream,” he told me. “My girl tell me to leave cigarettes. So I leave them.”

  But the police guards rotated constantly, so we never got to know them like we did our askaris. And we didn't know what to make of that night's guard. We were settled in the living room after dinner, taking advantage of the night's electricity to watch a video, when the policeman made his second unusual announcement of the evening.

  “The compound is secured for the night,” he yelled in through the screen door. “No one is to enter or exit!”

  “Well, we have a guest here who will need to leave,” John stepped out onto the verandah to speak with the policeman.

  “NO! I am on duty. The compound is secure. No one can enter or exit after twenty-one hundred hours!”

  John shot a questioning glance over to Nasser, our regular nighttime askari. Nasser shrugged at John, then gently tapped the policeman's shoulder.

  “You may be on duty, mzee,” Nasser said in a deferential tone, “but this is Mr. John Waite's home. His guest should be allowed to leave at any moment.”

  The policeman spun around and pointed his AK-47 at Nasser. “I am in charge here. I say who can come and who can go. And I say no one can leave this compound. This compound is secure.”

  Armstrong began yapping. It was Nasser who had bathed him and fattened him up after we'd first brought the mangy puppy home. It was obvious that the two of them felt protective of one another.

  “I will shoot this dog!” the policeman announced as he turned his gun from Nasser to Armstrong.

  “No, mzee,” said Nasser in a soothing tone. “This is a silly little dog. I will take him away from you.” Nasser grabbed Armstrong's collar and, walking backward and keeping his eyes lowered the whole time, disappeared around the back of our house.

  “I want my tea now, madam!” the policeman yelled again, this time putting his face right to the screen door that separated the living room from the verandah.

  “Come help me make tea,” I said, grabbing Jane by the arm and pulling her into the kitchen. “What kind of drugs do you have in your medical kit?” I asked. “Do you have something that we could spike his tea with and knock him out?”

  “Well, I've got some sedatives. We can grind them up and dissolve them in his tea.” Jane ran to the guest bedroom and came back with a bottle of little white pills. We smashed one up and put it in the thermos.

  “I think we'll need more than that,” I said.

  “How many do you think we need?” Jane asked.

  “Well,” I said, thinking this whole scene was eerily like the movie we had been watching, in which a woman ineptly tries to kill her philandering husband by lacing his spaghetti sauce with vast quantities of sleeping pills. “We want to be sure to put enough in to really knock him out, but not so many that we kill him.

  “Yeah, we want to knock him out but not kill him,” I said. In my mind I repeated that sentence over and over. Because if you think of yourself as a good girl from a bizarre but nice Jewish family who's followed her husband here to help people, you never really imagine yourself saying the words “Yeah, we want to knock him out but not kill him.”

  “I'll go peek at him and see if I can figure out how much he weighs,” Jane said nonchalantly.

  “Mzee,” Jane inquired sweetly. “Mzee, do you take sugar in your tea?”

  “Of course!” he huffed. “Lots of sugar.”

  Jane came back. “I don't know, I guess he weighs about a hundred and sixty pounds or so.” She thought for a moment. “Let's put in two more.”

  “What if he doesn't drink all of it, though?”

  “Okay, let's put in four just in case,” Jane said, grinding up another tablet. “That way one cup ought to knock him out. But it shouldn't kill him even if he drinks the whole thermos.”

  “Yeah, Jane, let's not kill him. That would probably ruin both of our careers.”

  We crushed up the tablets and dissolved them into the hot tea. “And more sugar, lots of sugar so he won't taste it.”

  “Our police guard seems a bit on edge this evening,” John said as he walked into the kitchen. I told him about the tranquilizing tea that Jane and I were brewing.

  “Okay, but you don't take it out to him. I'll give it to him.” John walked through the kitchen to the back door that looked out onto a small garden and James's house. Nasser was out there with James, who must have heard the racket and Armstrong's barking.

  “Nasser, come in here and look after my family,” John called softly out the door. “I'm going to take the policeman his tea.” A surge of warmth ran through me. For two and a half years I had been John's wife. But now that I was pregnant, I was his family.

  “No, mzee” Nasser said taking the thermos from John's hand. “You stay inside the house with your family. I will bring the tea. I was an army man. I know how to deal with this crazy policeman. I can disarm him if I can get behind him.”

  “Well, don't do anything dangerous, Nasser,” I said. “We put some tablets in the tea, lots of them. We think that if he drinks the tea, he will fall asleep and then you can take h
is gun.”

  Nasser smiled. “Madam is a very clever woman!” He took the tea and walked around to the front of the house.

  “Yes, mzee, I will tell them,” we heard Nasser say a moment later as he headed toward the back of the house.

  “Mr. John Waite and family,” Nasser announced loudly. “The policeman has secured this compound and requests that you lock up for the night.”

  John complied by closing and locking the French doors, which was all there was between our living room and the front porch. The thin glass doors would offer little protection, however, against a madman with an AK-47. With nothing else to do, the four of us huddled together in the living room. Feigning normalcy, we returned to the movie about the woman trying to kill her husband with sleeping pills hidden in the spaghetti sauce, because now we were all dying to know how that worked out for her. But each of us sat with one eye on the television and the other one on the door. We turned the sound up just enough to cover our hushed whispers.

  “Okay, what do we do now?” I was completely panicked. “We can't get out. We can't call for help.” The radio was in the Pajero, which was parked in the driveway, right next to where the policeman had stationed himself. “This lunatic could kill us and no one would even know that we need help.” I felt more vulnerable than I had ever felt since coming to Uganda. I took some comfort in the fact that a palm reader in Ecuador once told me I would die young, but not before giving birth to a daughter.

  “There's not much we can do but wait it out. Let's try not to worry too much.” John had his arm around my shoulder, but I was keenly aware of how isolated we were.

  “Beh, he's just a little psychotic,” Stefano said with a shrug. “Nothing to worry about. He'll calm down soon.”

  “He'll probably pass out soon,” Jane added. “I think we put enough sedatives in his tea to put an elephant to sleep.”

  “But not kill him,” I added quickly.

  We stopped talking and strained to hear any movement from the front porch. All we heard were the usual night sounds: a symphony of crickets carried on a gentle wind and a slow, steady beat of drums from somewhere off in the distance. John walked quietly to the back door.