Traveling alone, I hop on a packed charter bus from Bobo-Dioulasso to Banfora. There are 50 seats plus people sitting in the aisles. This guy opens a bag of chocolates and gives one to everybody on the bus. I take this gesture as a random act of kindness and forget about it until twenty minutes later he gets up again. He starts handing out tiny booklets for everyone to read. I'm assuming at this point he's some sort of a missionary. He starts talking, but I'm not in the mood to convert today, so I just gaze out the window and try to calculate the last digit of Pi.

Later, a few booklets eventually make it back to me, and I read the title- something about the marvels of urotherapy. Not sure what that is, so I open to the table of contents and skim through. So this is a booklet about the healing properties of urine? Looking at everyone's faces, they're all taking it seriously. It explains that since urine is actually blood filtered through the kidneys, it's the purest kind of liquid. It can be ingested or applied to the skin to clean out toxins. By passing through the digestive tract, urine gains valuable nutrients, such as vitamins and neurotransmitters. It says if you coat your skin in urine, you will sweat less. The taste is like vegetable broth with the fresh scent of hay. At this point I've been staring at this booklet for a long time, like a kindergartener taking more than five Mississippis at the water fountain. So I pass it back to other passengers.

The next stage of the pitch: The man unveils a bingo dotter filled with a green liquid. He had apparently dyed the urine green and added a minty fragrance to it. Bingo dotter in hand, the man walks row to row, asking each person if he can rub the scented green urine on the back of their necks. People are giggling and looking at each other, but I watch as most everybody complies. After making his rounds, he sells boxfuls of this scented green urine in clear plastic baggies to about half the bus. It's all about presentation, I suppose.

It reminds me of the guy in Tommy Boy who could sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves. But I think selling people your own urine is even more impressive.

The first time I heard about it on a radio program in the States. The segment was about some American dude who woke up in a train station in India with no memory of his own identity. He had no idea who he was or how he got there. The national authorities eventually found his name was David and got him the next flight home to his family. It was as if he was meeting his parents, his girlfriend, and (through photo albums and stories) his former self for the first time. It turns out that the same culprit responsible for his freak memory loss is the malaria drug that I take every Sunday. Small world.

The next time I heard about it, we were fresh off the plane and a second-year volunteer was lecturing us about the drug-induced schizophrenia we would inevitably experience: "This one girl woke up in the middle of the night, hallucinating that the ceiling was melting!" Hallucinations? I wondered whether this drug would wake me nightly in the wee hours to confront each of my greatest fears, one by one brought to life at the foot of my bed: ghosts of dead British children, horseshoe crabs, ventriloquists, crowded locker rooms. You know, the kind of stuff that horrifies all of humanity. I was prepared to voluntarily commit myself to the regional psych ward.

Thankfully, such hallucinatory night terrors have only haunted me once. In some sort of paranoid stupor, I awoke three times throughout the night believing spiders in my mattress were sucking blood from my back. I remember repeatedly bolting upright and brushing the creepy crawlies off my sheets, groaning at Tana to fetch the bugspray. I sat up each time (my go-to knee jerk reaction), half-believing it was true and half-believing the vision was false. After about fifteen seconds of vividly staring at these tricks of the imagination, all smoke would clear and I would realize I had been yet again deceived by the small white malaria pill called Mefloquine



Mefloquine isn't always psychoactive in a spooky way- while on this drug, I've had some of the most vibrant, dazzling dreams of my life. One night while snoozing, I found myself swinging from treetop to treetop in a rainforest by grabbing hold of the tails of multicolored snakes, the kind that don't bite and like to be swung from. Before Mefloquine, I've only ever achieved this quality and intensity of dreams after binge overeating at a Chinese buffet.

Way before the flesh-eating spider attack, I experienced three memorable hallucinations on separate nights. In the first, I sat up in bed, realizing I was somehow seated in a bustling airport terminal while people were hurrying past me on either side. The surrounding movements and commotion gradually dissolved to reveal the only movement around me was the wind rustling the mosquito net. Telle me, why again do I need that thing when I'm already sacrificing my sanity to be malaria-free?

During my second lapse of reality, Mefloquine convinced my brain that Tana and I had accidentally dozed off beside a swamp under a willow tree. Twice that night, I woke up and prodded Tana's arm, saying "We need to go home. It's gonna get dark soon." I was about to make a beeline for who-knows-where, until Tana talked me down like a hostage negotiator, and the swamp disappeared in a puff of smoke. Or maybe a puff of swamp gas.

The third incident was last night. I awoke, my eyes fixed on the ceiling, realizing that the neighbor kids in my courtyard had somehow fashioned a trap door in the roof above our bed. I saw their heads peering down at me. They had tied a rope around a box the size of a care package. They were lowering the box slowly towards the bed, Mission Impossible style. I swatted the box away with my hands. But when consciousness returned, the box turned out to be, you guessed it, that accursed mosquito net again. That net is the Roadrunner to my Wile E. Coyote.

Tana herself suffered some health problems resulting from Mefloquine early on, so after two months she switched to the daily pill Doxycycline. Before ending her stint as a Mef-head, she had one hallucination that was pretty trippy while we were still living with our host family. She saw a person looming over us, holding a tree branch with berries over our bodies. They were performing some sort of traditional healing on us. She remembers feeling perturbed that one of our host family members had broken in and was trying to heal us. Then she realized nobody was there.

By the way, you're probably really confused, because you thought this was an entry about illegal drug dealing. Sorry, the entry title is a typo- it's supposed to say "Dealing with Drugs." Having told you this, I expect you to read it all once more, bearing in mind that the subject is about coping with our government-issued malaria medicine. If you started reading this because you're an aspiring drug dealer, all I have to say is this: clean up your act, young man.

We may be excellent cooks, but don't be fooled.  We never cooked this much back in the USA.  We relied heavily on delicious and convenient fast food sources such as Arby's and Wendy's and Chick-Fil-A, and Chipotle and Jimmy John's and Dunkin' Donuts and Panera, if you can call that fast food.  We do so miss the comforting, familiar faces of the good people who work in these establishments.  Their name tags.  Their paper hats.  The way they always have change.  That's right, here in Burkina, no one has change.  They leave the restaurant and go next door to ask if anyone has change for a 10.  And, believe it or not, the last McDonald's restroom you used was significantly cleaner than any public latrine in this country.  (But probably only marginally cleaner than the latrine at our house.)

PRETZELS 101:

Step 1.  Make the dough.




Step 4.  Put the cooked pretzels in an air-tight container.




Step 2.  Let the pie cool for at least 2 minutes.


Step 3.  Serve the pie with a fork.