Plasmodium Falciparum

I have been diagnosed with the tropical disease known as Malaria. Which really isn’t as bad of a thing as it sounds. Malaria is almost synonymous with the flu. People just get it and take time off from work and deal with it. Aside from the occasional vomiting and room closing in on itself feel, it’s not so bad. If Rita wouldn’t have insisted rather forcefully in taking me to the hospital, I wouldn’t have ever gone. Turns out that she has quite a few years of experience in dealing with stubborn foreign students. So I’ve spent the last days reading fun novels and chipping away at the complete collection of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, all 45 episodes fitted onto one disk that I had picked up from a guy through the window of a trotro for two cedis.

I went to the doctor the other day. He kept on trying to suck blood from my neck. Don’t go to Dr. Acula.

So when I have decided to leave the comfort of my compound in the last two days, it is both difficult and refreshing to make my daily rounds down Okpunglo junction, greeting those that I see everyday. It’s difficult in my American mentality, in not wanting to talk to anyone, wishing I could just point my eyes to the ground, avoiding eye contact with everyone. But that’s not the way life works here, so when I do see the ever so familiar people in the same places, I stop and talk. “Yaya, come. How is it?” “Oh, I’m ok. I have malaria, so I’m not feeling so well.” “Oh, no. Sorry, ok? You go get some rest. We’ll see you tomorrow.” And such a simple conversation is actually quite nice. (The lady at the corner in the car parts shop calls me Yaya, thanks to Coach, who calls me Yaa, because I was born on a Thursday, making Yaa my day name. People think it’s funny that Westerners don’t know what day of the week they were born on.)

The life down any given street is amazing to me. The way that everyone in a given perimeter is so connected is an amazing thing. What else is there to do than to be outside, conversing with the rest of your neighbors? Just the other day, my roommate Sam and I were outside on the road, playing cards with one of our guards, Uncle Sam, and the next door neighbor guard, Idim. We sat in the shade, backed away behind the fence where we could use natures wonders to our advantage on especially scorching days, while we were huddled over a small table, with our fingers on our cards so that the breeze wouldn’t carry them away. As we were playing, my friend Coach from down the road came around so Sam and I scooched down our bench to give him a spot to sit. He sat with us a while, then left to meet with someone else. Soon after, the woman who sells red red in the morning across the main road came around and chatted with us for a while. I had never actually seen her outside of her red red stand, but naturally, she lived somewhere down this road and, naturally, she was friends with Idim and Uncle Sam. So we played and shared and laughed and had a good ol’ time about it. They had a wild time with Egyptian Rat Screw.

Pretty much what I’m trying to say is that there’s something to be said about community, about having a place in the world, an identity, based on those around you versus chiseling out your own personal niche. You are therefore I am therefore we are. “Where am I?” “You’re with us.” (is what they said). I can’t say anything for internalizing it myself, but I can say that it is something beautiful and worth giving a second thought, or four or eight. thousand.