Niger River Project

We stop overnight at a village on Lac Debo where we’d spent a couple of hours in the afternoon interviewing the villagers about the difficulties they’re facing with failing harvests. Dan starts a game with some of the village children that involves lobbing a tennis ball as high as possible and them fighting for it when it comes back to earth. Simple but effective – though it ends in tears for some of the smaller kids who get trampled underfoot in the stampede for the ball.

When night falls, we sit on top of the pinasse watching the stars come out. Without the slightest hint of light pollution to been seen anywhere over the lake, they’re magnificent. Orion is particularly splendid, marching across the heavens, bow drawn.

It comes to bedtime and we collapse the pinasse’s benches and use the planks to form a bed platform. Woven flaps fold over the side of the craft to create a cozy cocoon.

I’m surprised, then, to be woken in the night by a furious bout of shivering. It’s uncontrollable, convulsing my body. My skin doesn’t feel particularly cold, but my sleeping bag is fairly thin so, reluctantly, I extract myself from the relative warmth of the bed and put on more clothes.

Back in bed, the shivers show no sign of abating. This doesn’t feel like normal cold, I think, the alarm bells starting to sound at the back of my mind. Cold shivers are controllable; these aren’t, even when I exert my whole will to suppressing them. Besides, I’m never one to suffer much from the cold.

I slowly drift off to sleep, the shivers subsiding a little. But as I drop off, I know exactly what the problem is and that tomorrow is not going to be a fun day.

I awake to the sounds of the village coming to life – donkeys braying, children shouting and laughing, the first fishing boats leaving for the lake. My head is throbbing and I’m bathed in sweat. There’s no doubt in my mind I have malaria.

Sekou says we should abandon the trip and find a hospital. I’m reluctant, particularly given that we’ve paid for the boat, but I can also see the foolishness of carrying on when I’m about to lose my malaria cherry.

Fortunately, although we’re miles from the big regional hospital in Mopti, across the other side of the lake there’s a smaller district one at a town called Youwaro. We head out across the emptiness of Lac Debo, which this morning seems an even more remote and inhospitable place. Despite my condition, crumpled in a miserable heap in the bilges of the pinasse, I can’t help bu feel fortunate that we’ve got a private boat to ferry us around and aren’t having to rely on the fickle local pinasses to find help.

Youwaro isn’t much of a place, a small waterside town consisting of the usual ramshackle collection of huts, tumebledown buildings and thatched stalls. There’s plenty of interesting activity going on at the water’s edge, but today I don’t really notice it.

A walk across town brings us to the hospital. It’s a depressing place, gloomy, spartan and crumbling. Huddles of sick looking men, women and children line the corridors waiting to be seen; I join the queue, for today, at least, one of them.

After what seems an age I’m seen by a cheerful young doctor, who knows straight away what I’ve got. He sends me for the test anyway, just because I ask for it. A young assistant sticks a pin in my finger, drawing a spot of blood – tiny enough, but sufficient to confirm, half an hour later, that I have plasmodium falciparum, potentially the most dangerous form of malaria.

As I sit waiting for the results, the young doctor breezes past. “Ben Willis,” he says in that way Africans of chanting your name once they know it. “Today I think you feel very sick.” In my self-pitying state, I can’thelp but feel slightly riled by his happy-go-lucky nature. But at the same time there’s something reassuring in his attitude, which says, don’t worry,we’ve seen this all before, you’ll be fine.

Malaria was once thought to be the result of inhaling bad air in swampy or humid regions such as west Africa. All sorts of barbaric treatments were recommended by physicians of the day, the most famous being ‘cupping’ – or bleeding – where the patient was quite literally cut and bled to remove the pestilence. Eventually quinine was recognised as being effective in preventing the illness, after which, in 1890, it was identified as being caused by parasites spread by female mosquitos. Important as the breakthrough was, however, it didn’t come soon enough to save the countless European explorers, missionaries and merchants who succumbed to the disease and whose demise earned West Africa the label of ‘The White Man’s Grave’.

Fortunately my chances are much better than theirs, so long as we can get back to Mopti quickly, where the necessary drugs are on hand. How quickly that will be depends entirely on how fast the six-ton pinasse’s tiny outboard is able to propel the craft against the current of the Niger back to civilisation. The race is on.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 11:43 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.