Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25122
Yes, somewhere in French Sahara, I knew I was getting sick. At night I was reduced to lying on the grubby thin mattress. When it got soaked with my sweat I'd roll onto the dusty concrete floor in search of coolness. Puddles of sweat crawled slowly out of me like blood from a sniper victim. I spent days sweating on the cement floor of my windowless room. I was too weak to get up, too tired to eat. too stupefied by the fever to think straight. I pulled myself to the corner with the stinking drain as fluids poured out of my shivering body. I don't know how many star-filled nights I lay on that hard dirty concrete floor. I could see the stars through the open metal door. I could actually see them move, like a video being played in slow motion. lime had been disconnected. Deep into the night in the deadly godless silence of the Sahara, I could hear the sand whispering as the wind moved it over the ground. WI-tAT WEI~I: SOIVII: ()I: THI: MOST IlAN(;I:I~OlIS SITUATI()NS V()U I:N(:()UNTI:I~I:Il? One day in Uganda, I was watching the sunset and waiting for my travel companion, Rob Krott, to show up. For some odd reason I walked up to my room, a few yards away, to see if he had arrived and I was attracted by some inane Indian video on MTV. At 9:30PM a bomb went off. Where I had been sitting, there was an odd clearing. The crowd was deaf and I could see their wide eyes. The explosion ripped apart three people and injured a number more. There were people wandering, going no place in particular-just strolling. There was one crowd of people that ran around like swallows, changing direction for no reason-the aftereffects of shock. The people downstairs seemed rather blase' but they kept muttering 'bomb.' At first I didn't see any victims. Then I saw slow rivers of blood flowing toward the sidewalk. There were three people lying on the ground. There was no moaning or screaming; they had yet to come to terms with what had happened to them. My waitress was lying dazed and unbelieving, her white shin bones sticking through her flesh. She would live, but she would not have legs. Rob is a former Green Beret and has experience with combat wounded. He jumped into action-stuffing tablecloths into gaping wounds, stabilizing the dying, ordering the bug-eyed spectators to lend a hand. I helped to gently lift the shattered people onto the back of pickup trucks. A man was shaking his head and looking at the scene. He told me, 'This is very bad for tourism.' I looked at him and at the bomb-shocked bug-eyed man sitting in his wicker chair staring straight ahead on the back of the pickup truck. I couldn't help notice that he had a grasshopper sitting tenaciously on his head through the entire ordeal. My hands and pants were slippery with blood and sweat. In the cool of the early morning there was not much more that could have been done. Rob decided to go to the hospital. He got into a fight with the doctor because the doctor refused to operate. Rob started to scrub up but they stopped him. The victims died later on the gurney in the hospital. One Westerner was sitting close by and was deafened by the blast. He had a large cut in his hand and was covered with a frosting of glass. We brought him up to the room to stitch him up and gradually the story unfolded: A young man had asked for a glass of water and left a blue backpack under my table. I was the target. Later, I was interviewed by the local press who, despite what they have seen, reported that a man threw a grenade from a passing vehicle. A few hours later a thunderous rainstorm began washing the congealed blood into the street. I took a bus northward to the front lines in the Sudan. This was when I realized I was tired of being a tourist. ~ I