Of course I had the outfit. What fool would go to Africa without a long swishing skirt and cowboy boots? I believed I was all set. During the week I stood before thirty children and tried to teach them things I thought I knew; the alphabet, how to spell definitely. In my hut I learnt to make dinner with one pot, a relentless vegetable stew that Willy eschewed for beer at the pub with the friends he’d made and I hadn’t. I marked workbooks with the pen that never had to write upside down. I listened to Simon & Garfunkel sing Homeward Bound and the tap dance of lizards on the roof. At weekends I ran off to Harare at the expense of a friend of my fathers who owned a large hotel in the city. Photographs show us, the friends I had made, with white towels like turbans on our heads in plush rooms and beside a rooftop swimming pool drinking wine, aware but not ashamed of our privilege. Letters written home to my parents are gushingly dramatic, an awful lot of missing you terribly and there’s something in the air here making all emotion doubly powerful. Over the easter holidays I toured Botswana with another friend and her family. Throughout the first and second term the White priest with his picnic chairs and champagne came and went. My boots leaked and I caught bilharzia. The pills didn’t work and I caught malaria. Milk warmed on the paraffin stove gave me brucellosis. The long skirt which swished so pleasingly through the grass picked up tick-bite fever. And one morning while readying to walk from my hut to the low school buildings across the way a pain in my abdomen knocked me to the concrete floor. I remember someone running for the man who owned a car and being driven to the town where the White priest lived. The priest knew a surgeon, a mass of wild Scottish hair who was drunk from midday to collapse but catch him between hangover and beginning again and he could do all right under bright lights. In a hospital he removed my burst appendix. I woke in the priest’s house hours later, my left arm black with ants that had found me sleeping, a scar above my right hip, a bottle of whisky on the table beside me.
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Don't take this the wrong way, but this was your funniest entry yet. It's a comedy of (very bad) errors though.
We are so tough 🤣😂😍🥰❤️