WIHTWH: Going to the lake

Even though it means taking Praziquantel* three months later, it's still one of the funnest things to do in Malawi.





*I'll let you look up schisto (or bilharzia if you prefer) on your own; when I accidentally saw pictures in a Nature magazine right before we moved here, I just about kept us all in Idaho. I may have mentioned, worms were my greatest fear when we moved here. Seems sort of silly now. Even if we have them, which the kids at least probably have, we just treat ourselves every few months and it hasn't been that big a deal. We have taken the Praziquantel twice too, and it's not a nice drug. Only approved for animals in the US, though Andy tells me if schisto were a bigger problem in the developed world, undoubtedly there would be a more palatable way to treat it. Think HUGE pills--maybe the size of four or five Tylenol capsules, that make you dizzy and nauseated (rumour is, the more you're infected the worse you feel...I lay in bed and didn't move for four hours the last time I took it) (which is why I took it right before I went to bed last night) and the aftertaste it leaves lingers for hours, a bitter, oily, horrible thing. You have to really trust that invisible worms in your blood that want to live in your brain are worse.

Yeah. They're worse.

(Sorry, the temptation to brag about how crazy/dangerous/wild our experience has been is real. But really. See these pictures? Truth is, we're not that close to living on the edge, folks. There was the time last week we found the kids poking a little fat, square frog that seemed to be sweating drops of milky fluid on his back. Gabriel our guard informed us we should put the frog somewhere else, it's not sweat it's poison. That seemed pretty cool. But I mean, we have hobos, black widows, and rattlers back home.)

(Guess what else? BIG MOVES MAKE THIS MAMA STRESS OUT.)