In case you hadn't heard yet, that's the word on the street. So all you guys in Ghana, Rwanda, and Malawi, might as well have your relatives send you some gummy worms so you can at least say "we have worms where I come from too" just to fit in; although my guess is you'll have the African kind before the package makes it to you.
The other day I woke in the morning to find myself staring at a goat through my scorpion net . Yes, the goat was IN my room, next to my bed! It had been a rainy night and I guess it had decided to come inside to sleep. It might have knocked, but you know me, I sleep through anything. But you might be asking yourself why I call it my scorpion net. Well, I have come to fear the scorpions more than the mosquitos, and this is why. The other day we were at a meeting (that makes it sound like we were around some table in some office on the 7th floor of some building, but really we were just under a mango tree, the lucky ones sitting on cracked plastic chairs while the others trying not to fall off thin tree logs barely balanced on stones)-- sorry, I got sidetracked. I was saying that one of the men at the meeting looked sick and as I tried to follow the conversation in Arabic I caught just one word: malaria! Well, turns out that "when someone is sick they just say they have malaria." That's good to know I guess. And hey, I'm not worried because I bought myself the pills whose slogan is "if you get malaria take these pills and you won't die". You guys might have heard about those prophylactics that they have people take: the ones that make you have messed up dreams (or don't let you sleep at all); the ones that make you as sick as if you had malaria and worms at the same time; the ones that don't allow you to get tanned so you can be whiter than your usual color while everyone around you is already squinting as the light off your unusually white skin blinds them; and guess what? At the end of the day, if you take those prophylactics you still might get malaria! Malaria prophylactics anyone? Oh, and in case any of you were wondering, I haven't received my anti-scorpion stuff yet, so that's why my scorpion net is my lifeline. Today I was supposed to fly out of here, but my first attempt to make it to my sister's wedding failed. The gods were gracious enough to open the skies for us, but there are always man-made problems. The flight was scheduled to arrive at 13:43 local time. Here in the Nuba Mountains where we only have 2 scheduled flights a week, WFP (who runs the flights) probably thinks it's funny to set an arrival time of 13:43; as if there's a clock anywhere around the airstrip; as if anyone has a watch that is half-reliable; as if the flights actually arrive! And so it was that we sat there in our vehicles at the airstrip next to the fuel barrels listening... hoping that the 13:43 plane would show up. Suddenly, it must have been 14:43, someone's satellite phone rang. "Technical problems". No plane.
Having heard of horror stories of planes arriving, but not being able to land, I had rejoiced during the thunderstorm last night because I knew that not only before, but "there is calm after the storm" too. At the same time, I had also heard that pilots pull off all kinds of stunts. Once a pilot was trying to land, but the landing strip was covered with goats, so his first attempt failed and he had to go back up and come back around. On his second attempt he said "screw the goats" and just landed anyway. Fortunately none were caught in the propellers. Birds are usually the problem and in fact once, a pilot coming here hit a bird on his way up and announced to the 8 passengers that he would have to let all the fuel out in mid-air and might have to go in for a crash-landing since he wasn't sure whether the landing gear had been damaged. To come full circle, and to end the pilot stories, there was a time when a pilot, although advised and ordered not to land, had landed a plane in the worst weather conditions because "he just had to go"..."nature called"... I say it must have been the prophylactics. But in my case it wasn't meant to be... technical problems it was, and now I am still here in Kauda hoping that a plane will come and rescue me before it is too late. Literally rescue me. Save me from what could be my inevitable death or eternal family disownment if I miss my sister's wedding. (In case you were wondering I have NOT given my family the link to this blog)
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