Down Country, Part Three.

You know how sometimes, when you’re watching Antiques Roadshow, there’s a family story that goes along with an object, and more often than not the appraiser has information that undermines or completely contradicts the story? That’s kind of what it has been like for me, comparing my memories of our trip to Cheha with the written account that I sent to my sister at the time, more than twenty years ago.

First of all, it turns out that I went to Cheha not once but twice in the spring of 1995 – the first time with J. and Walter the Kenyan consultant, and a second time with a videographer from FH International (because I was already an expert by then!?). Here’s what I wrote about the first trip:

On Monday and Tuesday (May 8-9) we drove “down country” to FH/E’s Cheha project site. It was a really remarkable experience! We had to remember to take our malaria medication, and we have to continue to remember for the next four weeks. We spent three hours driving 110 km over bumpy, narrow roads, and those were the good roads! But it was well worth it, since we got the chance to hang out with project staff people and to meet and talk with some of the “beneficiaries”. We were really impressed by our visit to a child-to-child group. This is a group of kids who have gotten together to take over what had been an FH demonstration plot, where farmers learned irrigation and agricultural techniques. These 100 kids now come to the plot every day to tend their plants, and when their crops mature they harvest the produce and, after taking some home to their families (and increasing the family’s nutrition) they sell the rest at local markets. These kids know more about gardening than I do! Some of them were also given a goat to raise, and one little boy now has five goats and is relatively wealthy for a ten-year-old. The best part was realizing that these kids are learning things that their parents were never taught about health and nutrition and sanitation, and that gives them something else that their parents have little of – hope for the future. They expect something different out of life.

The second visit – the one I didn’t remember – I read about it in an e-mail message that J. had written to my sister in early June, telling her how much he missed me while I was away. We may still have a copy of the videotape that was made during this trip, in which case I will see if I can digitize the Ethiopia bits and get them online.

So: malaria. It turns out that the Anopheles mosquito, the one that hosts the malaria parasites, doesn’t live at high elevations. In Addis Abeba we were over 7500 feet, which is high by any standard, and this was both a drawback and a benefit for us. For example, water boils at about 198 degrees at that elevation, which means we had to boil our drinking water for several minutes to sterilize it. Baking was always a challenge, and not just because we were working with a finicky gas oven. Whenever we left town we ran the risk of developing a nasty altitude headache when we got back home. BUT – unlike most of our colleagues who worked in Africa – we did not have to take anti-malarial medication on the regular, and that more than made up for any inconveniences.

Our anti-malarial arsenal at the time included two drugs, chloroquine and mefloquine. According to Wikipedia, when chloroquine was first discovered in the 1930s, it was ignored for a decade because it was considered too toxic for human use. Potential side effects include muscle damage, loss of appetite, diarrhea, skin rash, problems with vision, and seizures. The common side effects of mefloquine, which was only approved for prophylactic use in 1989 (!!!), include vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, and a rash – but it also has potentially long term neurological side effects including seizures and mental illness. We knew none of this. We were encouraged to use the drugs in combination when we left the capital to make sure were we protected against different strains of malaria.

Our Ethiopian colleagues were just as vulnerable to malaria as we were, but they used different prophylactic tactics. The most common of these was an aerosol pesticide spray – Mobil brand, like the gas station – that they deployed liberally before they went to bed. My memories of those first visits to Cheha include sleeping (or trying to sleep) in a hot, airless, pitch-black room in a cinder block building, breathing in the petro-floral scent of Mobil spray. Waking up in that room was like waking in a tomb, dark and disorienting. There was no electricity, of course, and we had to keep the window shutter closed because there was no glass or screen or net to keep the mosquitoes away while we slept; after all, the very best way to prevent malaria is not to be bitten. And we didn’t get malaria; at least, not on that trip. That, I would have remembered!