If the Swahili Lessons Weren't Enough...

Coming down with acute appendicitis in Tanzania was only the beginning of Frank Bures' problems. Then he met his doctor.

By FRANK BURES

IT WAS A WEDNESDAY morning, only two weeks after I'd arrived in Tanzania, when I woke up in Dar es Salaam's Mission Mikocheni Hospital. The room was bright blue and across from me was an empty bed, a chair and a small closet that held my backpack. In the window, an old air conditioner worked hard against the January heat. Outside, a small lizard lay on the ledge, perfectly still, head cocked to the side. Around the hospital, palm trees swayed in the breeze.

I was groggy. My mouth and throat were almost too dry to talk. I couldn't sit up and could barely lift my head. My stomach muscles had been cut. Not long after I woke up, the hospital's bearded Ukrainian surgeon, Dr. Ravin, burst in, followed by the head nurse, a large, older Tanzanian woman with glasses, who smiled often, unlike her boss.

"How do you feel?" Dr. Ravin asked, sitting on my bed as he prodded my stomach.

"It hurts," I said. He continued poking and said something to the head nurse, which she wrote down. Then, he stood up and left with a nod. The nurse smiled and followed him out. I was alone again in the blue room. This was not my first encounter with Dr. Ravin. We had first met two days earlier, under more urgent circumstances.

THE PAIN STARTED at language school. It was nothing at first, a slight cramp in my right side -- irritating but not unusual. I continued to attend the lessons, which consisted of gruelling Swahili sessions with Alcard, our teacher, and John, a 75-year-old Dutch Canadian. He was born again, hard of hearing and loved to talk about his time in the Japanese prison camps in Indonesia during World War II. After the war, he went to Canada, where it took him 10 years to learn English. Swahili, at the pace we were going, would take much longer than that. The school was near the Uluguru Mountains, whose jagged peaks hung over the nearby town of Morogoro. In the foothills, the land was divided into small fields where farmers grew crops. Above these, a thick forest climbed up the hills. The ground at the school consisted of a hard-packed, red dirt and the winding paths were covered by jacaranda trees. A few baobobs were scattered throughout the campus, and I lived in one of the four rows of sparse dormitories. Outside my window, the birds never seemed to stop singing.

OTHER STUDENTS moved through their lessons into fluency... story continued.