Forget the malaria, the dengue, the yellow fever…

Let me tell you what will really kill you in Africa.

I arrived in Kigali in the late morning on Thursday, utterly beaten by my travel and utterly annoyed at my pansy self for feeling beaten. My luggage didn’t show up, my nose wouldn’t stop running, and I felt a fever, so instead of heading out to the city’s outskirts, where I was supposed to stay in a bring-your-own-wash-bucket kind of establishment, I decided, a la Eat, Pray, Love, to “take care” of my shakra or whatever and go to a hotel I knew in the center of town. There, I could drop my bags, pick up a phone (swindled!), swing by the embassy (no go: as of Jan 1, it has packed up shop and moved across town, where the rest of Kigali is happily gentrifying), and buy a new shirt to replace the rather miserably-scented garment I’d been wearing. All that, and take a nap by 3.

The nap lasted until noon the next day. I missed check out and had to shell out another 18,000 francs—to put this in perspective, I am told this is more than half of what a doctor earns in Kigali in a month—for another night. I’m nervous, less about the extra cash than about offending my hosts, who’d arranged my much more reasonable 5,000 a night stay in the bucket-bath place at my insistence (“No, no, I don’t need anything fancy—no, I don’t need a shower. Hot water? Overrated. Yes, I’ll bring my own towel. Pack it in my…luggage.”)

Finally I arrive at the little logement. I get your standard cheap Kigali room, which did me well for a whole month the last time I was here.

But then, I start to feel it. The wheezing.

This is a feeling I know. It’s what led to The Great Summer Exodus of 2006, from my otherwise amazing Renovated-and-Then-Overpriced Harlem brownstone to my Humbler-But-Cheaper residence. This wheezing, it’s sneaky. It starts all subtle, and then it’s uncontrollable.

It’s the last part I forgot about later, wandering wheeze-free through the city with The Law Student who also cares for the logement. We didn’t get back until after 10 p.m., and I was beat. I laid down—this next part I’m very ashamed of, so please, judge gently—popped open the laptop and opened the only Grey’s Anatomy left on my hard drive. (For fans: George calls out the anesthesiologist for being drunk, Izzie’s mad Meredith is having sex with Derek, and this crazy woman’s crazier boyfriend swallows her keys to keep her from leaving him.) Not a few minutes go by before I start to realize I am breathing like the crazy boyfriend, hacking like I want to release a doorman’s set of spares.

I sit up. It gets easier, but not much. I get out of the malaria-canopy (ie, bednet) and go blow my nose. Breathing is much, much easier over there, three feet away, by the (non-functioning) sink. I lay down again, thinking it’s all in my head.

Nope. It’s worse now, and I resolve to sleep on the cement floor. This means exposing myself to Certain Death by Malaria: This particular net doesn’t come off the bed, and all my DEET-filled bug spray is in the lost luggage. Upon reflection, I realize if I get malaria, I will notice and it can be treated, whereas if I simply stop breathing in the middle of the night, I might miss that completely. I strip the bed, lay one sheet on the ground and wrap the other around my body. When a mosquito whizzes by my ear—their wings produce a high pitched, almost angry drone—I grab my hoody, zip it around my body and tighten the hood around my face like I’m sealing up biologically hazardous waste. I think I am Malaria-Impenetrable, until I feel a mosquito on my cheek.

This is where, if you’ve read this far, you get your reward.

My dad had joked a few days before I left about the airline losing my luggage, so I threw five pairs of clean panties (back off, I learned to speak in Britain) in my carry-on. It dawns on me that the underwear-mask I used as a five-year-old to rob my own piggy bank might be at its most effective now, keeping the Evil Bastards off my face.

That’s right.

Now completely mummified against the sleeping disease, I lay back. Wheezing again. I resolve that I simply must just sleep sitting up, propped against the wall. (Note to Mike Cornick: I like to think that you never intended your joke, which my sister is fond of repeating, to be such a curse.) And this is when I am finally, finally grateful for my inexplicably large ass (Have you met my family? In context, my ass makes absolutely no proportional sense).

So there I…sit, waiting for sleep, biding my time mostly by drafting this blog post in my head. Actually, it was, like, totally meta—I was, like, sitting there thinking about writing it, and then thinking about writing about thinking about writing it. Way.

Eventually a new narrative emerged, one that involved a woman in a bustle, a bonnet with superfluous fabric and lace gloves. It was immediately clear to me that she was Little Bo Beep (for those keeping score, yes, she had no sheep), which is how I know I must’ve gotten some sleep.

Either that, or the Angel of Death is way more non-threatening than any of us ever imagined.