I dreamed in Africa...

I have had nightmares for the past three weeks. So have many of my classmates. They are a common side effect of antimalarial medications we all had prescribed to us before leaving the United States.

Nightmares are not strange to me. When I was seven I repeatedly dreamt that I went to school, stuck my pencil in the sharpener, started turning the handle, heard it churn the wood shavings and realized my classmates and teacher were zombies.

But these dreams lately have been stranger than usual. The colors in them aren’t ones I usually imagine in. The tones are laboratory-like, green and gray, and I am captured by people whose faces I cannot see or perceive as I try to escape from barred fortresses. My roommate told me I’ve started talking in my sleep. Hmm. Two days ago, the same medicine started causing symptoms mimicking those of the flu—I was dizzy, exhausted, and my limbs ached. I wished—like a child—that I could curl up in bed at home all day. But I have never been farther from home.

As a doctor’s daughter, I grew up believing illnesses could be fended off as easily as the big bad wolves I was certain slept in the bottom of my bed past where my toes could reach (wolves actually rarely attack humans and are one of my favorite animals). But on this continent I am not so sure. I was told before I left that if you get even a tiny bit sick in Africa, you feel certain you are going to die. After several intense food-poisoning episodes in India, I am no stranger to unforgiving tropical diseases, but I have never faced them outside the protection of medically-trained family members before.

This evening, as I took some Advil and read a chapter in my ecology textbook, “Wildlife Diseases and Veterinary Controls,” I began to succumb to hypochondria. The disease names held me terrifyingly enchanted. They were illnesses I had heard whispered, but never seen, aches that didn’t involve sitting on the couch with my grandma sipping flat 7up and watching Little Bear. “Many conservation areas in Africa are thought to have acquired their status as a result of the previous or persistent presence of regionally endemic animal or human diseases,” my text notes. Hmm. Several are listed: African horse sickness, African swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, anthrax, sleeping sickness.

Sleeping sickness? What does that mean? Falling asleep in my dim, high-ceilinged hut seems haunted, now not only because of the nightmares. (Oh no, there’s another source of inspiration for them.)

I will be switching to another anti-malarial as soon as we move to a new site, so I can sleep well enough to enjoy my life by day, which is a different kind of dream. On 5:30 a.m. game drives, I watch the sun come up over the savanna. It really is pink; the dust makes it look that way. And for an hour after it rises we drive through the hills that are waiting for the rain and see elephants and their tusks and the patterned ungulates and baboons. Then we drive back to camp and I have breakfast and go to class while monkeys groom each other and steal notebooks if my classmates leave them on outdoor tables too long.

If it weren’t for my bad dreams, or feeling ill, I’m not sure I’d ever want to come home. One particular morning, I was eating an apple as I walked to class, and a baby Vervet monkey sat on his haunches, clasped his hands around an empty space near his chest (an imaginary apple? I am guilty of anthropomorphizing, I know) and said so softly, “Eee, eee.” I crossed my arms and denied him the fruit; I did not want to be responsible for feeding wild animals, but I admired his begging techniques. And another day I sat on the porch sorting dung beetles for a field project, and saw a mongoose and bushbuck in the trees several meters from me.