About halfway through our fieldwork period, I got sick. Fever, sore throat, aching joints. I was doing OK during our last days in Tenkodogo, Burkina Faso, only feeling a bit faint, but after the bumpy ride across the border down to Zebilla in Ghana, the sickness got a proper hold in me. Just standing up made me feel like I would collapse.
We went to the local clinic and they tested my blood for malaria parasites, but couldn’t find any. In all likelihood, it was just an ordinary cold, and resting was the only cure.
Which I did, lying on the guesthouse bed, knitting, watching old Downton Abbey episodes and eating Swedish candy, drinking bottle upon bottle of water, and feeling like I might disintegrate into the hot, dry air.
My thermometer couldn’t make up its mind. I probably didn’t have a particularly high fever, but because the outside air temperature was about 42°C, the thermometer didn’t know what to measure and kept on jumping up and down, never settling. The guesthouse did not have air conditioners in the rooms, and the ceiling fan could only lazily wisp around the hot air.
And I think there is something that happens when outside temperatures get warmer than 37°C. The body has to work on cooling down rather than staying warm. And with a fever, well, things just go completely haywire. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as weird, as completely knocked-out. The world felt Dalíesque, like solid things would turn into liquid at any moment, my computer start trickling down the bed’s edge.
Outside my open window, the pregnant guesthouse goat never stopped bleating, entering my half-awake dreams like a creature from another world.
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In a couple of days, I was cured and could complete the fieldwork. Still, those feverish days in the semi-desert heat stuck with me for a long time afterwards, a weariness in my bones that I couldn’t quite shake.
Katja Malmborg 