Mefloquine Dreams

My new "roads" in Tougouri looking towards school from my house

and towards center of "town"

Thursday October 29, 2009

I can’t say I’ve had many adverse side effects from taking mefloquine (preventative anti-malarial medicine) on a daily basis. However I become a slight insomniac the day and the day after I take Mefloquine and have had a few vivid dreams. My first Mefloquine dream worth noting is one I had at my host families’ house during stage about a month in. At this time, I was sleeping inside (because not allowed to sleep outside where it was cooler..long story), so sleeping inside I would wear as few of clothes as possible and sleep with the door shut. So this night I’m only wearing shorts and a sports bra (not culturally appropriate to be out of my room). I wake up in the middle of the night, scared for my life, thinking that there are tons of spiders coming out of my pillow. I jump out of bed and run outside, where my host mom finds me jumping around, almost hyperventilating. She calms me down, not before bringing me a pagne to wrap around myself, enough for me to tell her that there are spiders all over my room. She goes to my room, discovers no spiders whatsoever and comes back outside. By that time, I’m more calm and have realized that the spiders were probably a dream. So I try to explain this to her, while not knowing the word for « dream » at the time and end up telling her that malaria medicine did this to me. I’m sure my dream just made her think that Americans are just crazy.

I haven’t had any other really scary Mefloquine dreams, though a few others have involved spiders as well. In another dream I was headmaster of a private school where everyone wore these very elaborate green uniforms. Unfortunatly it wasn’t Hogwarts…

Last night I dreamed that I was back in the U.S. on vacation and forgot (don’t know how) to go to the grocery store. This was horrifying at the time so my family stopped at a store on the way to the airport to come back to Burkina. Rushing through the grocery store I couldn’t find the things I wanted and had to hurry to make the plane. I woke up crying. Even though I woke up crying, I’ll take grocery store mishaps over spiders erupting from my pillow any day (or night). I wonder what my next dream will be about…

Things that make me laugh :

1. Being told that by widening and flattening the paths into “roads,” Tougouri will be “a big town like Ouaga”
2. When sitting cross-legged, being asked if I’m doing “Tai Chi.” How people here know about Tai Chi, I don’t know.
3. Titling a section a section on a test “What Am I” followed by various descriptions of plant parts that students are supposed to identify by name and I get many responses of “I am a young boy/girl named…” before they read what comes next.
4. Having to explain multiple times that I am not cooking with dirt when I was seen putting dirt into a pot to make a dutch oven
5. Hearing “bye-bye” from little kids all the time, even when I’m just arriving some place, because that’s what you say to the white person