I Feel it All

It is hot and needs to rain.When I asked the question if this was the beginning of dry season I was told "no", that this was in fact "the end of rainy season". So, that cleared that up.

The thing with Ango is it becomes so unbearably hot and then the sky relents and releases torrents of rain and wind flavored with thunder and lightning that keeps your eyes glued to the sky for hours on end. Though rainy season wreaks havoc on the roads here and you have to allow hours more for travel between point A and point B, it does keep you from going insane in the humid jungle heat and the monotony of soul penetrating sun which, I mist point out, is a far cry from the healing sun I always knew growing up in California. My California sun was welcoming and wrapped its arms around you. The sun here is menacing and you just do what you can to hide from it like a playground bully.

These are two different suns, without a doubt. 

What makes the sun feel even crueler is the 101F/38C fever I am running due to my immune system frantically trying to figure out what to do about my red blood cells exploding one by one. 

You go to bed feeling fine after an evening of bitching about life then laughing about it over whisky before calling it a night at 9:37 because you are all exhausted and can't believe it is only Wednesday. 

Then, you wake up at 2am with terrible stomach cramps and think again about the latest batch of homemade yogurt from powdered milk but fall back asleep... until 3am when you scramble for your headlamp and make your way in the chilly clear skyed night to the pit latrines. This pattern continues twice an hour until you have a headache and are so exhausted you just sleep in the paillot (mud hut half-way point between bed and bathroom) between the excitement. 

Around 5am Ellen is there, working. Our health projects are needing lots of report writing these days. Being the good nurse she is, she asks how I am in all sorts of other details that I will spare you.

Ellen: I'll get you some orals.

Me: I get Oreos!?!

By 11am I can't walk to the bathroom without needing to stop and rest, which is problematic considering the urgency of the situation. A rapid result malaria test says negative, but the way those work is that if it says you are positive, you are, but if it says you are negative, you might or might not be. 1pm we pricked another finger for the blood and got a clear positive result. I started on malaria meds that have just as exciting side effects as malaria itself has to offer.

I can feel each individual cell, I swear. They have all turned into tiny sandbags and I can barely move. I give up on Skyping because it is nearly impossible to lay next to my computer and exert the energy required to lift a hand and 4 fingers as typing requires one key being hit at a time and thoughts are less clearly conveyed when your hand just lays on the keyboard with the weight of a thousand sandbags. I fall asleep and wake up in the exact same position, because even my subconscious cannot move me in this state.

Woke up this morning after two heavy doses of meds feeling half way decent. Well, maybe not halfway, but I am sitting upright and typing with two hands and that is a major improvement. I even ate a piece of bread. Miraculous.


While I can no longer say I am the only one in Ango who has not gotten malaria since being here any longer, I am happy it didn't require a medevac like two of the other expats here or just straight up kill me like a lot of the population because they don't have access to the right meds. Malaria kills more people a year than AIDS. Not cool.

Of course I got to thinking of the sick people around Ango. So many of them ride with their sick family members on the back of their bikes for miles and miles to get medical treatment, often waiting till it is nearly too late because of what a hard journey it would be and the questionable treatment they could receive. Recently a story came through of a lady from Ango taking her sick husband on a bicycle to a health center that was 15km away. He died en route so she had to turn around and take his body back home to be buried. 


Its a tough life, no matter what way you look at it. 

Anyway, that's the news from Ango. 
I am never leaving my mosquito net again.

Safe and Sound

Nothing like a little random gunfire to remind you to get your saferoom in order...

Dafia

You really have to go into aid work knowing you may never be thanked, acknowledged or perhaps you will even disliked for your long hard days filled to the brim with ridiculous stress (and, by that, I also mean things that stress you out would be absolutely ridiculous and absurd in the “real world” back home). Why? Well, for more reasons than knowing giving without expectation of return. Mostly for reasons of sanity. 

Then, on Tuesday this week when we were settling in for our weekly coordination meeting, we were interrupted by a man bringing us three chickens, 6 eggs, a large sack of rice and a larger sack of peanuts along with a letter from the community of Dafia (15km from Ango) thanking Medair for the work we have done there. Later, we would all admit we were fighting tears the whole time. What an incredible gift, and that the community would all decide to give of what little they already had to thank us for the work we had done in their community. It was too much to take in, really. Photos were taken, words of gratitude exchanged and we dove back into coordinating more health centers, latrines, wells and the logistics that string it all together and make it happen. 

The next day, our maman’s prepared a meal for the whole team from the gifts we had been given, as it is really everyone’s work who has contributed to the projects there. I asked one of our base guards (kind of the lowest ranking position around) how his work had contributed to this gratitude of the community of Dafia. He sat a little straighter and with a smile on his face explained all of the links between the small projects he does around the base, the security provided, the checking of kilometers on motorbikes and Land Cruisers, loading cargo and other daily tasks were vital to the work that is done there. It was encouraging to hear his thoughts on this, because, as a base manager, I am rarely outside of my base. I see lots of emails, spreadsheets, meetings and cargo, but not often do I get to see the end product.

Yes, I know these 3 tones of medicines I am maneuvering into Ango will save thousands of lives and that these pipes I am counting for a stock report will keep people from getting some of the awful waterborne diseases available in and around Ango, but its not like I am there watching it happen daily, you know? So, hearing someone who is even more indirectly involved talk about all the ways his work helps people really touched me. How incredible to work for an organization where even the lowest man on the totem pole feels important and that his/her work is valued? 

So, thank you to you, people of Dafia.

Thank you for helping me regain perspective that gets lost in the paper trails all too often.

Why go into this work on a daily basis not expecting to be noticed?

Because when your work evokes the most earnest expressions of gratitude, it is awe inspiring and overwhelming joy and gratitude that floods your heart. 

Live Simpler

There is no such thing as a simple life. There never has been. Yes, there is a way to live with less complication, less technical things to break down and cause more bills. But simple? Not possible. It is nostalgia for our idea of what the past might have been our nostalgia for what has never actually been.

Jon Stewart proved this with one of his classic montages a few years ago – I am sure I posted it somewhere. 

So, I have a t-shirt with a whale on it soliciting readers of my chest to “live simply”. I like it, I wear it, I am pretty sure I want to live by it. But the thing is, the act of life and the nature of simplicity are mutually exclusive. People are complicated and even if you live the life of a recluse, you are still a people. 

I have long strove for the ideal of living simply and the closer I feel I get to it, the more complicated things become. This is not true only because I live in a remote village in the middle of Africa (really, look up Ango, DRC on the satellite view), but it was true even when I was living in an alleyway compartment or on a small sailboat, or a studio downtown, or my mom's house. I have managed to stay free of mortgage, car payments, blah, blah, blah, but I have never felt I did not have a complicated life. People are not simple and I live and work with people. I am a people. Not simple. You get the picture. 

I am pretty sure I am not the first to come to this realization. I am also pretty sure this is not the first time I have realized it - it is the first time I am admitting it to myself. Perhaps the answer is to just live more simply. 
There is always excess, even in the “simplest” of lives. 

Live simpler, there is beauty in complexity.

Pedigrees and Paradigms

Laurel used to marvel at what she referred to as my "pedigree".

The immediate preceding branches of my family tree could not be more different.

East Coast, white collar, well educated, mimosa drinking, thimble thin, tightly wound Irish Catholics on one side...

West Coast, blue collar, live off the land in Alaska, beer drinking, quick to laugh, husky Germans on the other...

I could not love one side more than the other. They are equally as wonderful, loving, supportive, eccentric, world wise, street wise, Godly, faith filled, full of love and family as the other. My family is amazing and I would not change them or our history for the world. I am so blessed.

My sisters and I, aptly dubbed “The Brandt Girls”, have grown into this balance with as much grace as a bull in a china store could hope for. In that I mean to say, that we are two seemingly opposites forced into one body that must now manage to find peace in who we are and where we come from…

We are like bulls in a china shop... but at
least we manage it, though, we do not own it – yet. For many years, well, most of them in my adult life, I have found each of these sides advantageous in one way or  another. It can, though, at times be a bit disorientating

Fall in love with a guy who lives in his VW bus? 

But, of course.

Graduate from an esteemed university?

Check.

Accompany a friend to med school graduation?                                                                      With pleasure.

Navigate the back allies of Tijuana handing out freshly made burritos to prostitutes and heroin addicts?
Okie dokie.

Work as a PA to an NGO director in Hong Kong? Distribute vegetables from a local farm while living in a laundry closet? Move to the DRC? Drive a sports car? Drive a 4x4? Drink espresso? Try pastiche? What country have I woken up in? What do I wear? Will I be cold? Will I be over dressed? Wait, where am I again? What the hell am I doing here???

This week I feel the equatorial straddling of these polarized mores.This week I will go from mud huts and 4x4s to crowds of symphony goers in the Swiss Alps. 

How, you might ask? A magician never reveals her secrets – especially when she has no idea either. As a matter of fact, I am just going on a whim of faith that I will not freak out. It might be just fine and I will not skip a beat or it might be a revisitation of the post-Haiti bread isle in Alberston’s reverse culture shock freak out of 2003.  

But heck, I won’t know until I try, right? 

Plus, I have a real hankering for good wine and being outside at night without fearing for my life. So, here I am, mid-transformation. Do you know how much work it is to shave your legs when it is only worth shaving them every 8 weeks? If not, count yourself lucky. The ridiculous implications my daily life has on my personal hygiene habits is enough for a whole other blog post. No, really, I have already given it much thought long before this.

But for now, do not dwell on the nastiness of man leg hair  – Instead, marvel, along with Laurel and I, at just how good a strategist God is, at how such an odd coupling of gene pools could yield offspring that is perfectly fit for the ridiculously polarized life of a humanitarian aid worker.

I laugh at it – or rather, myself – on a daily basis.

I could be being dramatic, quite honestly, I could be.

However, I started writing this in Entebbe and now, sitting in Dubai I honestly feel like I am living someone else’s life – or perhaps that life I just left behind was someone else’s and this one is me?

Side effects from too little sleep? Perhaps.

I cried like a baby watching Soul Surfer on the plane, it made me so homesick I swear I could taste ocean water on my lips and feel the salt drying on my eyebrows. Strange teary effect often felt in airplanes? 

(It is real, TAL validated my suspicious of its existence) 

I sure hope so, or I have more things to worry about than another sleepless night in another airport.

I need to go find a corner out of these halogen lights.

Far too many of these sentences have begun with "I".

Time to find some other subjects before I bore you...
... or myself.

Oh, and P.S.

Has anyone else ever notice how flipping difficult it is to format blogspot with photos? I spent over an hour trying to let my OCD be OK with how this looks and it is still driving me crazy.

Be Anxious for Nothing – except when on Larium

Hello blogosphere, I write to you from an empty dining room in an Entebbe guesthouse.

I would like to say, that I am no longer taking Larium. 

At first, it seemed that the side effects were not, in fact, affecting me. I have always had nutty dreams, most notably, my dreams have a bad habit of picking up where my day left me off. This is cause for some genuine confusion come morning time. Some of my coworkers who are prone to depression stay away from it, as it can make you more depressed. However, I have not felt more depressed than the expected dose of depression when living in an isolated, impoverished, conflict-ridden village in the dead center of Africa. 

I did notice, however, on my last R&R, there was little of both. I could not fall asleep without my passport, money, Swiss Army Knife and headlamp on the pillow beside me. That way, if anything happened, I would know where the important things were and I could run quickly. 

Now, before you think I sound out of my mind, please, bear in mind my daily life style and the places I have been for recent R&Rs… are they in your mind? Alright then. 

  

So, with that in mind, you may understand that my heightened sense of paranoia is not necessarily unhealthy, but a mere necessity of environmental adaptation. I have assumed thus,blaming all my anxiety on Ango. The thing is, this enlightened level of anxiety 

has been instrumental in getting me through
my day to days at the Ango base. 

Yes, I love my job… but it might be out to kill me. And if not my job, then Ango in and of itself. 

Take last week alone: 6 foot viper in my generator, giant spider watching a movie with me by my head on the wall, giant spider bites all over my legs that are still bleeding 6 days later, 5 days in a row of 14 hour work days, mosquito and fly bites that make me wonder if I have leprosy, lightning strikes, bumpy airplanes, dodgy roads, over exuberant military… I could go on, but I am getting more stressed out just typing this. 

Either way, you get the point. 

So, needless to say, my daily needs of adrenaline, anxiety and paranoia have been perfectly on par with my level of activity. However, like I said, my last R&R I was really struggling with feeling very unbalanced and uneasy. My levels of these usually much required pheromones (Are those pheromones? I don’t think so, but it sounded good.) did not drop as my level of activity and responsibility did. So, I had made it up in my mind that if I could not calm down in Europe this September, it was time for a change in my malaria prophylaxis. 

The other day, though, when I got to Bunia, one of my coworkers was talking about how calm she was after going off of Larium, then another chimed in on how it was making her crazy and another how she was still paranoid even as she was staying at her cousin’s house (an ambassador, who lives in one of the most fortified places you can find in these parts)… So, yeah, that to say, I have quit cold turkey. Now, fellow hostel stayers do not have to endure my talking in my sleep and I do not have to endure waking up to hitting walls with my fist thinking I am defending myself from a carjacker in Nairobi. I guess it is a win-win situation. 

However, with the switch always comes a bit of exposure risk. In my cosmetic bag for my Europe R&R (where I hope to soak in as many Rs as possible), I have a thermometer, two rapid result malaria tests and malaria treatment, just in case. So, yeah, if needed, I will be giving myself a blood test… because I don’t already do enough ridiculous things in my life. 

I am not a Guava

Colby the Colobus - Part Two

That night Colby cuddled in my arms and fell asleep. I gave him tree climbing lessons, walked him around, fed him various fruits and generally spent too much time thinking about how awesome this was.

He would turn when I called his name, run to me when I knelt down and climb on me when I held out my hands.

I loved him.

So, Monday we met and Tuesday I was feeding Colby a guava when it fell out of my hand and he bit the next available thing... me. I immediately put him on his tree stump and started squeezing the space between my thumb and pointer finger. At first, it did not seem he had broken the skin. I had this perfect little arch of purple pressure marks and as I washed with soap and water, two of the little marks began to bleed.

Dang it.

I kept squeezing it, hoping to purge anything that might be trying to invade my blood stream. I went to our medical office, which was sparsely populated with medical staff, but one of our supervisors was there to administer iodine. I had already raided one of my co-worker's rooms for an alcohol wipe from her first aid kit, but I was feeling ultra paranoid. Monkey bites are nothing to mess with.

As iodine was administered to my now barely bleeding hand, I was told not to worry, that anything that could be carried by the monkey could not be helped with any medication. AIDS, Ebola, etc.

Clearly, I needed a second opinion.

So, I emailed our 24/7 on call doctors at InterHealth. Dr. Claire got back to me so quickly and with fantastic advice. All of the first aid intuition I had administered was right on, including squeezing the bajeepers out of my hand. So, yay me. I also needed strong antibiotics and antivirals and post exposure rabies vaccinations... all as soon as possible. Antibiotics we had, but the rest would require a logistical miracle. So, I started making some radio calls, and when they did not work, it was time to bust out the SATphone.

The earliest I could get the vaccinations and myself in the same place was Friday.
That was later than the 48 hours recommended, but that's what I get for living in Ango.

I could wait.

Wednesday morning I woke up to a dying Colby. 

                                By 11:30am he was dead.

I could not wait.

By 2:20pm I was on a MAF plane that was chartered just for me, on my way to Bunia. By Thursday afternoon I was in Kampala at The Surgery getting my post exposure vaccs and various other preventative tablets.

Hour 47 of the 48 hour window. Thank God for an amazing team and good health insurance.

The doctor requested I stay in Kampala for at least a week, to be sure I do not come down with a fever or any other worrying symptoms. So, here I have remained. Pretty bored, missing Ango and really feeling like I have not worked much in the last month.

Though I have had no fever, I have felt sick all week and so lethargic. I am told by wikipedia that this is rather common when taking 34 pills a day of heavy-wide-spectrum antibiotics and antivirals. It has been hard to focus on working from here, even though I had high hopes. I just feel like vomiting and laying down all the time.

Hopefully these side effects will subside now that I am only on one of them. I want to go back to work, I want to fix some recent mistakes I have made there. I want to never have a pet monkey without a local vet.

It was fun while it lasted. It makes for a very dramatic story, though at no time did it actually feel dramatic.

In the end, I made it into our country program's monthly Situation Report that gets sent to HQ:

"Courtney Brandt was bitten by a monkey on 19^th July and medivaced to Kampala for preventative treatment. She arrived at the Surgery in Kampala 47 hours after the accident."


And onto InterHealth's website for World Rabies Day:

"At InterHealth we often come across weird and wonderful cases of infections, and rabies is no different... An aid worker in rural Democratic Republic of Congo had been vaccinated against rabies. She encountered a cute baby colobus monkey half way through her project. Unfortunately, the baby monkey playfully nipped her. She wasn't close to medical facilities and required a semi-urgent medevac to complete the post-exposure treatment."

                                                                                                                      So, that's something.

Ango Awesome