TRAVEL MEMOIRS

I Became Delirious in the Middle of Snake-Infested Paddy Fields

When a weekend adventure turned into a malaria-ridden nightmare

My sister and me with our friends. Photo is the property of the author.

Decades ago, malaria was an illness that could have easily wiped out humanity. But the strides made on eradicating it from the West have saved billions of lives, and enabled studies into treatment to reach farther and wider.

As an expat child living in Africa, my parents did all they could to protect my sister and me from all the tropical diseases present. Bar wrapping us in cotton wool, that is. Eventually, one of us succumbed to the illness.

It was a Friday afternoon, after school was out and my dad arrived back early from the office, that we jumped in the car to head out of the city.

There weren’t many relaxing places to vacation that were just a drive from Accra, the capital city of Ghana, where we were living at the time. So this wasn’t your average weekend away but a visit to an ex-colleague, and now friend, of my dad’s, who was working on an agricultural project in the rural land beyond the city’s limits.

But it was an adventure for me. I was eight years old and we were going to stay overnight in a hut surrounded by paddy fields. This was the third country on the African…