Thanks for keeping up with us for two years.

Nature wants me dead. It has made four separate attempts to destroy me in the past couple weeks. And it's so unfortunate that with the current course of events continuing the way it is, I may not survive my time abroad, much less be there when the Mayans awaken from the sea floor and take the Earth. A Mayan is like a godzilla, right? I'm confused. My point is that my days and my luck may have run out.

It's hard to pinpoint just when my luck abandoned me. It was there at high school post-prom when I won a ski resort lift ticket. When I was a freshman in college I remember finding a 20 dollar bill on the sidewalk. I often look back on these accomplishments and feel like a high-roller in the casino of life. Yet, here I was, minding my own business, about to bike home from Banfora with groceries, whistling the Sesame Street theme, when all of a sudden the sky turns black.

Winds came at me as though through an opened door on an airplane. I told my trusty bike everything would be alright, pulled her to the roadside and ducked between a metal boutique and a brick wall. This was a perfect hideaway from the ensuing nearly horizontal rain. Naturally, three other men sought shelter beside me. I exchanged minimal pleasantries—faking a lack of comprehension to cut short all the usual foreigner-induced conversational tropes—all the while keeping one earbud in, listening to my beloved podcasts. Oh, my precious podcasts. Suddenly, around the corner we hear the cracking of the 4x4-inch wooden poles supporting the overhang.

There's a series of movies called Final Destination (they're great, really) where innocuous everyday environments and objects turn against the heroes as gauntlets of doom. This felt like that. The tin roof of the overhang crashed to the ground around the corner. Then after a gust of wind, the tin hit the wall. Then another gust blowing between the wall and the metal sent the thin corrugated sheet of tin straight at me. My baseball instincts kicked in and I stuck out my hand to catch it. It didn't hurt or bleed all that much. But at some point I realized I could see all my handguts, like all those colors and shapes that you're not supposed to see.

After the rains an hour later, I had biked to the Banfora hospital where I sat in a room across from a reclined shirtless boy, rubbing his belly and staring at me. Like me earlier, he was unresponsive to small talk. My phone was too soaked to operate so I borrowed the nurse's to call the PC doctor. The nurse then handed me a list of things she'd need to stitch me up. So, this emergency room is like a pizzaria where customers supply the flour, tomatoes, and cheese? She pointed to where I should buy them (a building a few feet away) and I thought she was pointing at the pharmacy, a five minute walk outside the compound.

She emptied the bag I'd journeyed to buy, swabbed up my hand, stabbed me with some anesthetic, and waited nary a moment for it kick in before threading my wound closed. I winced, made involuntary faces and noises, to which she invariably asked "ca fait mal?" and continued to barrel through.  It could be a trend in Burkinabe health care—at the dentist, too, they are speed demons that seem to believe incidental pain is worth the speed. They might be right. This contrasts to American doctors' slow pace and oversensitivity to patient's potential for even slight pain. Discussion question: are American patients sissies?

I should say that the entire stitching operation was done expertly, albeit solo and in an informal fashion. I was sitting upright on a bed, flipflops dangling and holding a kidney dish under my other iodine-scrubbed palm. She was on her sixth stitch of eight when a male nurse came in and "helped," making jokes about my name being a country. His mouth sounded like it was full of cotton. In retrospect he may have been just some guy.

I want to emphasize here that the total cost of an ER consultation in Burkina Faso is a whopping two dollars. Are you listening to me, Bon Secours Health System of Richmond, Virginia? Bet you sleep pret-ty good at night, Bon Secours, on them bags o' gold, dontcha?

So to finish my story about how Mother Nature has a vendetta against my soul: not two days later am I in a different city on my bike again when a surprise downpour catches me again off guard. In my escape, I fall off and scab up my elbow. The next day I am running to catch a bush taxi when I stub my toe on a large rock. First, the elements of wind and water conspire against me, and now earth? Finally, a week later I got food poisoning from vegetables and my bowels felt as though they were on fire for 24 hours. And yet, I don't know. Somehow, sitting here now, I feel mighty, as though I've overcome the trials of Hercules.