It began one night when I went to bed feeling like I ate too much for dinner. The rice and beans didn’t quite settle, but I would be ok in the morning. About two hours later, I make my first trip of the night outside to toss my cookies. After the second time, I thought for sure I was feeling better. Four trips to the hole in the ground later and I knew something was really wrong with me. I was sick for about two days, but I bounced back quickly and joined my team to go plant a church in Amoro (about 45 minutes from Gulu) for the weekend.
Amoro was the most like what I imagined my time in Africa being like. We pitched our tents right outside a group of 3 mud huts. We ‘bathed’ out of a small bucket out in a field, squatted over a fly-infested hole when we had to go to the toilette and were awoken at 4 am each morning by the family rooster.
Less than 24 hours after arriving in Amoro, Shannon had what we called a heat stroke, but then we soon realized it was something else. After suffering in a sweltering hot mud-hut for another day or so, we sent her to the hospital where she found out she had malaria. It took her over a week to recover and by that time, we left for Tanzania.
Our first week in Morogoro, Tanzania was really busy with evangelism and preaching nearly every day. By the time I was about to take a day off, Ashlee had been sick for about 5 days and desperately needed to go to the hospital. I accompanied her there at 9 AM Saturday morning (March 13th). A trip I thought would take no more than a few hours turned into 9 days.
Ashlee was diagnosed with severe malaria. The doctor said she had 20,000 parasites which I never thought was possible considering Ken had just recovered from having 1 parasite. The lady in the bed next to Ashlee was vomiting every few hours and she only had 8 parasites. Ashlee apparently held the record for most number of parasites so she was checked into the hospital. The first bed Ashlee was in was in a group room of about 50 patients. There weren’t enough beds for everyone, so another woman crawled up on Ashlee’s twin-sized bed with her. It was about 100 degrees in the room and went up in temperature about 10 degrees during visiting hours. Africa has a ‘funk’ to it anyway, but when you’re crammed into a sweltering hospital where each patient has ten family members visiting them, the smell is multiplied to a sickening degree. Mix the smell with the swarm of ants crawling on the walls all around you and you’re pretty much in a nightmare.
Praise the Lord that they allowed us to move to a private, air-conditioned room when Ashlee was told that it would be dangerous for her to leave the hospital with that many parasites. So I spent the night with her in the hospital. About an hour after we got into the air conditioned room and Ashlee started getting a bit more comfortable, the power went out in the entire city, including the entire hospital. The nurse and doctor came in to put an IV into Ashlee’s hand to start the medicine in the dark. They didn’t even have flashlights. They used their cell phones to put in the IV!!!! I was in shock, Ashlee was in pain and I thought I was in the twilight zone. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Soon after the IV was in, Ashlee and I went to sleep. Throughout the night, and into the next day I would help Ashlee if she had to get up and go to the bathroom. But she became increasingly unresponsive until she stopped talking all-together on Monday, March 15th. I called our squad leader along with a British woman Bev (who spoke good Swahili and English) to see if this was all normal. They said the malaria medicine did make most people act similar to this, but we couldn’t get her to respond, even by pinching and slapping her for about 24 hours. We moved her to a legit hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on the 16th. About two hours after arriving, she became conscious again and actually started talking to us for the first time in two days! Despite this improvement, they admitted her to the ICU there and asked Dan and I for our blood so they could give her a transfusion. It seemed a lot more serious than we ever anticipated, but both of us thought it would be a great story to give Ashlee our blood. So we went down to the lab where I found out my blood type is O positive and gave blood for the first time in my life. Thank God that they ended up not needing the blood, but it’s still a cool story. She was released from the hospital on the 19th and I stayed in Dar es Salaam with her until she left for home on Monday the 22nd. Now she’s back in Monticello, AR fully recovering for a few weeks and will hopefully join us back in Asia.
My other teammate Katie had gotten an Amoeba during Ashlee’s time in the hospital, but has since also recovered. So, if you were wondering why I haven’t blogged in awhile, there’s the story. We now call Ashlee: 20K, Katie: Moebs and Shannon: Heat Stroke. So, with a few fun nicknames and a healthy team, we are getting ready to head off to Asia.
