A Trip to Remember

I have to give a little bit of time to one of the best/worst things about service in Niger: malaria medication. There are three types for PCVs in Niger: malarone, doxy, and Mefloquine. The most effective, and thus the one used by most PCVs, also has the most interesting side effects. This post is the Mefloquine nightmare, I hope you enjoy.

I could talk a little bit about my cluster curse, a legendary series of bad luck events that have hit my cluster and resulted in my near-total isolation in Niger for most of my service. For those of you who don't know, Volunteers are posted in clusters within a few kilometers of one another to assist in work and support in a foreign land. My cluster has unfortunately been decimated by a rash of bad luck: early terminations, medical evacuations, problems with village posts, and the occasional "wack-evac," a medical separation based on mental health issues. As a result, for most of my service, my closest neighbors have been 30k away or, when they're gone 120k, a five hour odyssey to the capital Niamey. With the new stage swearing in this week, I'm finally getting new neighbors, and I will no longer be one of the most isolated Volunteers in country.

Unfortunately, the cluster curse nearly hit again. I have two new neighbors, and one of them was accidently dosed with Mefloquine. She spent a horrifying week unable to sleep for three days. To give some kind of reference, Mefloquine is an anti-malarial prophylaxis that causes strange dreams among everyone that takes it, some rare cases of extreme anxiety, and has been known to make everyone a bit crazy at time. We take it once a week, and my new neighbor, Annette, took four at once, and managed to keep them down. Everyone in Niger was horrified to hear about a four pill dose of Mefloquine. The only thing it could be compared to was a mythical story about a stagere who was given weekly Mefloquine instead of daily Doxy and took it for 12 days in a row before he had to be medically separated and sent home for psychiatric treatment. Now, just to clarify, I don't know if this story is true, but it's one of the great legends of Peace Corps Niger.

The best/worst part of this drug is the intense, vivid, long dreams it gives you. While on Mefloquine, I can remember a few dreams, the weirdest of which I'll share. I remember I was at a book signing with my college professor Jim Fisher. It was a book I had written, and he asked me, "Well what do you think about all the Jews?" I looked around and saw a lot of rabbis in different technicolor outfits. Instead of black robes, hats, and shawls, they were wearing a variety of reds, oranges, blues, and greens. For some reason, that I still cannot explain and probably will never be able to, there was a phone that wouldn't stop ringing. I didn't want to answer it because it was in the toilet. Not just in the bathroom, but in the toilet.

In another, I remember thinking that I wanted to steal some green peppers growing in an orchard. In the dream, these peppers were the size of my head and grew from palm/bamboo type trees. It took me about eight waking hours before I remembered that peppers don't grow on trees.

The latest dream that I can remember was my father visiting Niger. My father has been in a wheelchair since he was a kid, so the sand in Niger would usually present a problem for him, but he had an all-terrain wheelchair with some strange independent axle system, which enabled him to roll over rocky terrain like a moon rover. He kept explaining how to kill a goat (this was right around Tabaski) and kept impressing upon me how important it was to do it right. Then he ran me over with his all-terrain wheelchair.

This is only a small sampling, and these kind of dreams are the fun ones. They're not always like that, however. I accidentally dosed myself with two Mefloquine one horrifying day in mid-September. I didn't have a problem sleeping, in fact, it was more of a problem waking up. I took a nap, and I remember waking up and texting my friend Rose from my house in Niger. Then I woke up. My phone was across the room. Then I woke up. My cat was sleeping on my chest. Then I woke up. My cat was sleeping in a corner across the room. Then I woke up. It repeated like this for hours and hours: dreams that were not different from reality and were, in fact, dreams within dreams within dreams. It lasted for three days total, during which time I almost called our medical officer because I could not differentiate dream from reality. The only reason I didn't is because I wasn't sure if I would actually call him, or call him only in a dream. Luckily, this horror show only last three days. Any longer and I would have gone home and checked myself into a mental ward. Schizophrenia and terror for all!