Trippin on Malerone In Kibuye

Today the girls and I headed out to Kibuye with Steve’s team.  It is by Lake Kivu which is huge!  It borders Congo and I believe Uganda as well.  We met Steve’s team at their hotel in the morning only to find out that they had no room for us in their vans due to all the supplies/aid they were bringing with them.  So thankfully I made arrangements with Skip the night before to ride up with them.  So I asked Isaiah to take us to Skip’s hotel to drop off our bag with Jean Marie, who is now his driver, and then we waited at Bourbon for a couple hours.  Skip and his family met us there for lunch and then we headed out for the 2 ½ hour drive to the lake. 

 

The drive was gorgeous!  The countryside of Rwanda is incredibly beautiful.  I can take pictures but you really cannot get the gist of it unless you see it for yourself.  Fortunately there is a newly paved road out there but unfortunately the road curves winds the mountain and then back down.  Which made a few of us nauseated.  We finally got there and Jean Marie took us to our guest house only to discover that it was under construction.  We took one look at it and Skip and Lara said you are absolutely not staying here.  So we piled back into the van and headed to the Bethanie where they were staying.  They only had a room for tonight and they were full for the next night.  So we check a couple other places including the Hotel Golf.  At the golf we found Steve and his team eating dinner.  Apparently they had trouble with their original guest house and after about 2 hours of dealing with them they checked into the Hotel Golf and missed their appointment at the refugee camp.  So we were grateful that we missed their chaos and arrived later with Skip and his family.  The golf was full until I explained to Steve what was going on and they somehow found 2 open rooms for us.  Imagine that!  We go upstairs to check out our rooms and that was an adventure in itself.  First of all you do not want to climb or descend these stairs if you are medicated, intoxicated, or even just plain tired.  If there is no light, just stay where you are till morning.  They are stairs of death!  Steep, small, and not the easiest to maneuver on.  We check out the rooms and discover that the bathrooms are shared.  Its hostel style.  You get your own roll of toilet paper and your towel and you wait your turn to use either facility down the hall from your room.  The rooms were funky smelling of mildew and dead bugs, and had drilled holes in the walls for who knows what purpose; peeping tom’s or your new best friends the cockroaches and mosquitoes.  So I said we are out of here.  I thanked Steve profusely for his efforts to find us two rooms that had magically come available and he said he completely understood and to go back to the Bethanie.  So that’s exactly what we did. 

 

We check in and which consisted of the lady just handing us a key.  They girls asked if we needed to fill anything out and she just said I guess and handed them a piece of scratch paper and they wrote down Jade, Caroline, and Brit Frickety.   We got to our room and it was humble accommodations but a world of difference compared to where we had just come from so we were content.  The hotel had a buffet dinner prepared for all the Saddleback people that were going to be there (the next day) but there was enough of us there that night to enjoy it all to ourselves.  We ate dinner with all the geckos and headed back to our room.  We all took a shower…let me clarify, separately, not together and went to bed.  Jade and I opened out mosquito nets only to discover that the mosquitoes had already eaten through them.  They were brown in come places and came fully equipped with band aids all over them, so we tied them back up and decided we’d be safer without them.  After laying on our beds for about 5 minutes and hearing the mosquitoes flying around Caroline says, I think we should put deet on.  The three of us in unison just about said oh ya and jumped out of bed.  So we put our bug repellent on ourselves and slept with the poison that we had just washed off ourselves instead. 

 

Well now it is about 2am, and I am laying there on my wood plank of a bed with a rock for a pillow thinking that it would have been more comfortable to camp it outside and wishing I had Shawn’s sleeping bag to zip up over my head after swatting away my new friend mosquey, my affectionately named, malaria-infected pet mosquito that insisted on checking out my face in the dark.  All of a sudden I start feeling really sick.  Maybe it was the anorexic chicken I ate or maybe it was the malerone that I had just taken to prevent mosquey from infecting me, but either way I was extremely nauseous.  So I am staring at the dark ceiling unable to sleep, praying that God would make me feel better and I get up to go into the bathroom, just in case, when my cell phone rings.  Its Shawn calling to  check up/in since his phone had been dead the last few hours cause I had the charger to our phones.  So I am trying to run to get my phone in the dark, and you know when you are trying to be quiet and you end up making a bunch of noise?  Well I brought a stampeded of elephants in with me and I just started laughing at how noisy I had just been in my effort to be silent.  I grabbed my phone and walked outside to talk to him.  He was still up working and was about to head home and go to bed.  After I got off the phone with him I tried to go back to sleep.  I finally fell asleep with the sheet over my head as my protective anti-mosquito eating my face off barrier. 

 

I fall asleep around 2:30am and have another tripped out dream.  You see ever since I have been in Africa, every night after I take my Malerone I have the craziest dreams about African people.  Apparently the nausea and the weird dreams are a wonderful reaction to avoiding malaria.  Although I have never shared with you my insane dreams, today I will give you a little summary of it.  Basically I was at the Bethanie when Pastor Rick and his crew arrived.  We were checking in and someone handed me Shawn’s computer and cell phone because he had apparently left it somewhere.  So after I got it I discovered that everyone had left me behind so I had to get a ride up the hill.  This man picked me up in what I thought was a taxi and I drove by Shawn’s car.  So I had him stop so I could put his stuff away and I saw little Mikey in the car wearing Mickey ears.  He told me that Shawn had taken him to toon town (in Disneyland) and they were going back as soon as Shawn got back to the car.  Anyways, I get back to the taxi and the driver had gone through my bag and had taken out my “clean blood kit”  which is really just gloves and clean needles (in case something happens here and I need clean needles), but in my dream it contained actual vials of different blood types.  Well this guy had set it up and was squirting the blood out of the needles everywhere.  Well I got really mad and starting yelling at him saying “What is wrong with you?  Are you crazy?”.  Well he looks at me and pulls out a machete and says “Crazy?  I’ll show you crazy!”  So I quickly shut up and let him continue to drive me to the group.  I get there find Shawn, tell him what happened and at some point I had to go back outside to throw something away.  Well the guy was out there waiting for me and starting running after me with the machete trying to chop me up!  I started running away yelling for Shawn to help me.  Well I ended up waking myself up because I was yelling “Help Me!” out loud in my sleep.  I woke up and I was crying so apparently it started while I was dreaming.  When I realized that I was yelling in my sleep I started laughing.  So I am now laughing and crying and then I hear Jade very softly say “Brittany are you ok?” and amidst my emotional and psychological confusion I finally realized what was going on.  So needless to say while there are other malaria medications that will make you hallucinate, the Malerone gives you some pretty intense dreams.