First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Part 1

  Chapter 1 - In the Beginning (There Was John)

  Chapter 2 - One Day, We'll Tell Our Grandchildren About This

  Chapter 3 - I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Leave

  Chapter 4 - How a Tampon Made a Peace Corps Volunteer out of Me

  Chapter 5 - In All of Its Third-World Glory

  Chapter 6 - One Good Leg Between the Two of Us

  Chapter 7 - Take Me Home

  Chapter 8 - Falling Apart Where No One Knows Your Name

  Chapter 9 - These Eggs Aren't Getting Any Fresher

  Part 2

  Chapter 10 - Oh, God … We're Going to Uganda

  Chapter 11 - A Lovely Little Corner of Hell

  Chapter 12 - Home Sweet—or at Least No Cow Dung Here—Home

  Chapter 13 - Two Kinds of AIDS

  Chapter 14 - The Birth of a Domestic Bush Goddess

  Chapter 15 - The Voice of the Mzungu, or Food, Glorious Food

  Chapter 16 - Scaredy Cat

  Chapter 17 - Notes from (Way Out in) the Field

  Chapter 18 - Getting a Life

  Chapter 19 - A Little Bit Pregnant in Uganda

  Chapter 20 - No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

  Chapter 21 - The Smell of Sweat and Old Sex

  Chapter 22 - Law and Order in the Wild West (Nile)

  Chapter 23 - My African Pregnancy

  Chapter 24 - Return to the Land of Plenty

  Part 3

  Chapter 25 - It Takes a Village

  Chapter 26 - Package Hell

  Chapter 27 - Can You Hear Me Now?

  Chapter 28 - To Market to Market (to Buy a Fresh Fish)

  Chapter 29 - Go White Team!

  Chapter 30 - The Beginning of the End

  Chapter 31 - Life and Death in Uganda

  Chapter 32 - Standing Fast and Ready to Run

  Chapter 33 - Forever in My Blood

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2009 by Eve Brown-Waite

  All Rights Reserved

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.broadwaybooks.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brown-Waite, Eve.

  First comes love, then comes malaria: how a Peace Corps

  poster boy won my heart and a Third-World adventure

  changed my life / Eve Brown-Waite.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Ecuador—Description and travel. 2. Uganda—

  Description and travel. 3. Brown-Waite, Eve—Travel—Ecuador.

  4. Brown-Waite, Eve—Travel—Uganda. 5. Peace Corps (U.S.)—

  Ecuador—Biography. I. Title.

  F3716.B76 2009

  918.66—dc22

  [B]

  2008022034

  Ebook ISBN 9780767931496

  v3.0_r1

  Dedicated to my Prince Charming,

  for the happily ever after,

  and to Jeremiah and Sierra,

  for coming along

  Author's Note

  This memoir is based on actual events—some of which happened twenty years ago. But I am blessed with an excellent memory, so everything I wrote here is true and happened exactly the way I said it did, though others may disagree—but they should write their own books!

  Naturally, I've had to reconstruct a lot of the dialogue. But as I said, I do have a very good memory (although sometimes I forget to feed the dog, and where the hell did I put my glasses … ?) and really I can often remember exactly what a person said and what the weather was like on a certain day, even if it was twenty years ago. And like I said, if you disagree, then just go write your own book, John.

  Anyway, in the rare instances where maybe I could not remember the exact details of an event or precisely what a person said, I did what all writers do, and I filled in the blanks—because if I didn't, this book would be much shorter and you'd be bored. But I did stay true to the intent of each conversation and in no way meant to portray anyone in an unfavorable light. (So if you cringe when you read about asking John if he was shtupping me after our first date, Mom, you have no one to blame but yourself!)

  The letters that appear in the book are all taken from actual letters I wrote, although they are edited quite liberally and in some cases were originally written to people other than to whom they are addressed in this book. I did this because, let's face it, some letters are like the contents of your nose, lots of bothersome useless stuff, but every once in a while, something of interest. I picked the interesting stuff out for you.

  Everyone who appears in this book is real and for the most part I use their real names, except in a few cases to protect their privacy and because one person really, really smelled. But I am indebted to everyone who appeared in my life and who appears in this book—even the person who really, really smelled. And I thank them all for being a part of this amazing journey and for letting me write about them.

  The book is funny, but malaria is not. More than a million people in Africa die from malaria each year, and it's the number one killer of children under five years old in Uganda. We can do something about that. Ten percent of my royalties from First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria are being donated to organizations doing malaria prevention work in Africa. I invite you to join me by making a donation to one of these fine organizations that are working on malaria—and other much needed health issues—in Africa:

  CARE/USA

  151 Ellis Street, NE

  Atlanta, GA 30303

  African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF), USA

  4 West 43rd Street, 2nd Floor

  New York, NY 10036

  Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) USA

  P.O. Box 5030

  Hagerstown, MD 21741–5030

  In the Beginning (There Was John)

  “So tell me why you want to join the Peace Corps.” John looked across the table at me with his emerald eyes, and my heart danced a jig although my boobs stayed firm in their minimizing bra. I was moved by how earnestly he seemed to want to know. Okay he was the recruiter and it was his job to ask. But, still, I was flattered by his attention. I was glad I had chosen to dress in safari chic for my interview. I thought my flowing bias-cut skirt, green canvas boots, and waist-hugging floral blouse had a certain I-may-be-going-off-to-the-jungle-but-I-still-look-damn-cute quality to them. That, and I knew the blouse showed off my breasts.

  “I honestly can't tell you why I want to join the Peace Corps,” I answered. “Just that I have always wanted to.” I looked around the conference room at the University at Albany that had been set up as a Peace Corps recruiting office for the day. Smiling down at me were posters of Peace Corps volunteers in quaint fishing boats, dilapidated schoolrooms, and mud and thatch villages. The volunteers exuded a sheen of sweat and satisfaction, and they were all surrounded by happy, grateful villagers. Them, I wanted to say. I want to be like them. Well, maybe not so much the sweaty part.

  “Well, I can understand that. Growing up, my family had me pegged to become a priest. I'm the middle of five Catholic boys. One of us had to be a priest.” John laughed. “But helping others was never a religious thing for me. It's just what I think we were put here to do.

  Y'know?” He smiled and I couldn't help but notice his straight white teeth and sweetly freckled face
. Cute, I thought, if you go for that clean-cut look, which I didn't. I'd always had a hazy but persistent notion that I'd end up with a man who'd be tall, Irish, and look a bit scruffy in his red beard. My mother added her own notion that I'd probably meet him in the Peace Corps.

  But this definitely wasn't the guy. When we first spoke on the phone to arrange the interview, I hadn't cared for John at all. I was expecting someone more hippielike than businesslike, and this guy was all business. My first look at him confirmed my earlier impression. John seemed far more prep school than Peace Corps.

  I crossed my legs underneath the table, accidentally kicking the wicker hamper that I'd stashed there.

  “Can I ask about the picnic basket? It's just a bit unusual for March,” John said.

  “It's actually my sewing basket. I'm making a quilt. I usually bring it along wherever I go. That way I can keep busy in case I have to wait.”

  “Oh, sewing is the kind of skill that would be great in the Peace Corps,” he said enthusiastically.

  “Great,” I said, less enthusiastically. I was definitely not the Suzy Homemaker type the quilt made me out to be. I had only recently taken up quilting to pass the time on the nights I volunteered to stay home and take calls for the Rape Crisis Hotline. Fortunately, we didn't get many calls. Unfortunately, my roommate and I couldn't afford a television, and I was bored stiff on my volunteer nights. I got some fabric and a book on how to make a quilt, which recommended starting out small, by making a pot holder. But I didn't need a pot holder, and I didn't believe in doing anything small.

  “So, what other skills do you have that would be useful to people in developing countries?” he asked, the pen in his left hand poised over a yellow legal pad with “Candidate #14–Eve Brown” scrawled across the top.

  “That's a good question. Let's see. I was a political science major in college. With a women's studies minor,” I added quickly.

  “Uh-huh.” John looked at me expectantly, pen not moving.

  “And I was president of the Student Association.” He didn't write that down either, so I didn't bother to add that I had championed such causes as free transportation to antinuke rallies and keeping the legal drinking age from being raised to twenty-one. “I guess there's not a lot of transferable skills there.” Nor in the fact that I can make a mean banana daiquiri, I thought.

  “Well, tell me about what you do now,” he prompted.

  “Like I said on the phone, I teach sexual assault prevention in elementary schools.”

  “Teaching, that's a great skill. Host countries are always requesting teachers,” he said, writing. Having spent the last two years in the company of every snot-nosed kindergartener through sixth grader in a five-county area, I was hoping to get away from teaching. I was thinking more along the lines of organizing the oppressed. Helping them to rise up, claim their due, and perhaps win myself a Nobel Peace Prize along the way. But I didn't quite know how to communicate this to my recruiter.

  “What did you do in the Peace Corps?” I asked John, hoping it was more exciting than teaching English.

  “Economic development,” he replied.

  “So you exported capitalism to the Third World?” I could practically hear my socialist great-grandparents heave a collective “oy vey” from beyond the grave.

  “Well, I worked with farmers to build an irrigation system so their crops wouldn't fail and their families wouldn't starve when there was a drought.” He stood up. Quite tall, I noticed. He took off his sports coat and hung it over the back of his chair. “I helped families put fences around their farms so animals wouldn't eat their livelihood.” He sat back down. “I helped plant a grove of mango trees so there'd be fruit in my village in ten years. And I helped women set up businesses as seamstresses so they would have money to buy medicine for their children. I don't know,” he said, rolling up the sleeves of his somewhat faded blue button-down shirt. “Does that count as exporting capitalism?”

  “No, that sounds wonderful, actually.” He had the most adorable red fuzz on his arms that matched the glints of red in his slightly wavy brown hair. “Tell me more about your experiences.” I wondered if batting my eyelashes was a skill that would be useful to people in developing countries. At the moment, I was proving to be a master at it.

  “I lived in a village called Bomboré in Burkina Faso, which is one of the poorest countries in the world. Every volunteer is assigned to a community, a host country partner, and a primary project. But you can find your own secondary projects to work on. You get settled in your village, make friends, and then you look for opportunities to do other stuff. For me, that was the best part.”

  As John talked, I could almost see the dusty, brown village he loved. I could smell the smoke from the clay stoves he built to help women conserve wood. I could hear the delighted squeals of the barefoot children as they played soccer with the tall, friendly stranger. And I could see John a little tousled and scruffy around the edges. I was beginning to find the whole thing—the Peace Corps and its poster boy—more and more attractive. I could just imagine John and me together on some tropical island. Granted, it was all probably more Club Med than Third-World slum, but this whole Peace Corps thing was looking more appealing by the minute.

  So I told John about my political awakening in the student senate of the State University of New York College at Oneonta. How I had discovered that I had a passion for politics and a natural ease as a public speaker and had gradually begun to take on more and more serious issues. I told him how, as Student Association president, I had won a class action suit that gave students the right to vote in their college towns all across the state. I told him of my involvement in local politics and my growing concern about America's involvement in the guerrilla wars of Latin America. I told of getting arrested the summer before for participating in a sit-in at my congressman's office, and of the ten days I spent in jail for that. And I told him that I hoped to go on to do something that would meaningfully impact people in the rest of the world.

  “Thank you, Eve,” John said, rising and shaking my hand at the end of our two-hour interview. “Thank you for being different from the other thirteen candidates I interviewed today. I think you'd make an excellent Peace Corps volunteer. I'll forward your application, along with my letter of support, to the placement office in D.C.” Then he said something about medical clearance and forms, but I just kept thinking how nice my little hand felt in his big, strong hand. “The process can take a while, so be patient,” he said. “In the meantime, call me if you have any questions.”

  “Um … I am a little worried that my jail time might be a problem.” A criminal record, I was pretty sure, can keep you out of the Peace Corps.

  “I think between what you wrote in your application and what I've learned about you,” he said, tapping his pen on the yellow legal pad, now quite full, “we can adequately explain your time in jail. Spending ten days in jail for a civil disobedience charge shows that you are committed to your beliefs.” He smiled. I didn't try to disabuse him of his noble image of me by informing him that I could have gotten out of jail by paying the $50 fine, but that the ten days in jail got me a lot of publicity, and like I said, I didn't like to do anything in a small way.

  “Well, maybe I could call you in a week or so, just to check?” He said to call if I had any questions, and I was going to have lots of them.

  “That'd be fine,” he said. “And call me if you ever come down to the city. We could meet for lunch or something.”

  Yeah, or maybe we could pick out names for our children, I thought.

  Driving home that evening, I wondered if I really would go through with this. Joining the Peace Corps someday had always been part of my plan. As in “I hope to join the Peace Corps someday,” which is what I said when I won an all-expense-paid trip to Israel as a high school exchange student. And “I'm thinking of joining the Peace Corps someday,” I said ever so coolly the fall I came back to college after spending the summer picking apples an
d scraping up chicken shit on an Israeli kibbutz. And “I'll be joining the Peace Corps in a couple of years,” I answered when asked my long-term plans when I interviewed for the job I had now at the Rape Crisis Center.

  So I had long been about the Peace Corps—in concept. After all, it never failed to get an approving smile and an admiring “oh, isn't that wonderful” when I said it. But the reality of the Peace Corps—the sweating in a bug-infested jungle and being deprived of creature comforts—well, that I wasn't so sure about. But I knew that eventually I'd have to poop or get out of the latrine. The I'll-be-joining-the-Peace-Corps-someday line was just going to seem pathetic if I was still muttering it while pregnant with my third child and toting the other two around in my Chevy Suburban.

  But now it was two years since my college graduation. I was still living in Oneonta and still dating the sweetheart who was supposed to be my last college fling. He and I had a wonderful relationship, but as much as I loved him, for a reason I just couldn't put my finger on, I knew he wasn't THE ONE. Just as I knew that I had to get out of Oneonta in order to get on with my life. It was join the Peace Corps or go to law school. And when faced with two equal options—one being what would be expected of a nice Jewish girl and the other being somewhat outrageous—well, for some reason, I always choose the one that would make my Orthodox Jewish grandmother roll over in her grave.

  It had taken me nearly a month to fill out the Peace Corps application. I was surprised by how thoroughly they investigate their applicants. I was volunteering to go to some god-awful country, live in a shack, and dig latrines for world peace. Obviously, I was insane. Wasn't that what they were looking for? But apparently they wanted their recruits to be insane and well qualified at the same time! We were required to have a college degree or be highly skilled, be in excellent health, have no potentially troublesome wisdom teeth, nor any romantic or financial entanglements.

  I was asked to list all the courses I'd taken and what grades I'd received. I hoped to make up for my barely B average with my interest in all things international, as documented by my three consecutive semesters banging on coconut husk bongos in Javanese Gamelan class. I assumed that I was healthy enough to live in less developed countries, because at that time, I had not yet ruined my health by years of living in less developed countries. Since my wisdom teeth had never even come in, I figured that would pose no problem.